Visual Studio is a complex tool used by a wide variety of developers. Customizing your tool makes you more productive, and Visual Studio is highly extensible. In this demo-heavy session you will see how to write your own Code Snippets, how to write and use macros, how to write a simple add-in, and how to create your own templates for projects and project items, complete with wizards. Streamline development to fit your processes and habits by writing a little code to ensure that Visual Studio works the way you do.

This is an introduction to Visual Studio Tools for Office using Visual Studio 2008 and Office 2007. (Note that Visual Studio Tools for Office also works with Office 2003)

Visual Studio Tools for Office allows you to build custom solutions that run on top of Microsoft Office products using Visual Basic or C#. For anyone who has ever said, "I wish Excel could..." Visual Studio Tools for Office is your solution.

Topics include an overview of Visual Studio Tools for Office, creating new Office add-ins and adding controls to the Office Ribbon.

3 examples include:

• Excel Add-in to pull data from Ole Db data sources for times when managers ask, "Could you put this in Excel for me... every week."
• PowerPoint Add-in to build an instant slideshow for Karaoke night
• Word Add-in to transpose guitar chord sheets - great for

This session will be conducted in Visual Basic but all concepts are directly applicable to C# development as well.

The Visual Studio Setup Project is going to be changing in Visual Studio 2010. Instead of fighting with the dependencies and being handcuffed to buy a multi-thousand dollar tool just to customize the user experience the developer division is looking within to WiX. Windows Installer XML (WiX) was developed by a couple of Microsoft developers in their spare time and has gone on to support the installation of Visual Studio, Office, SQL Server, and a number of third-party packages. We'll take a look at what WiX is all about and how you can get your app setup with WiX!

Truthfully there is much more to development with the SharePoint platform than the raw aspects of the technology. While I have been building enterprise-level applications on the top of this great platform for years, I have discovered that there are some common challenges that SharePoint architects and developers often face when building such applications.

In this session we will explore some of the toughest architectural decisions you may face during the development life cycle of a SharePoint project, how to deal with common real-life hurdles and how to utilize existing best practices, patterns and practices, tools and ideas to ensure that your SharePoint applications successfully transition from development to release.

You are a .NET Developer using Visual Studio and are tasked with extending your software to the Windows Mobile platform. You have never written a Windows Mobile application so where do you start? During this session we will go through what you need to get started, all the tools that are available within Visual Studio, the tools available with the Windows Mobile SDK, where to put your data, .NET Compact Framework, tips and tricks to make your applications perform and various other tools to make your quest to build your Windows Mobile software a breeze!