I don't think I mentioned it, but I'll be speaking at TechEd, which is a first for me. I'll be doing a talk on Visual Studio Extensibility:
DEV345 - Extending Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 with Managed Packages and the Visual Studio Managed Package Framework
Monday, June 4 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM
Visual Studio 2005 (VS 2005) provides you with three levels of extensibility, macros, add-ins, and packages. This session walks you through the process of developing a package written in managed code (Visual C#). The example managed package is the open source project, XPathmania, which was the winner of the Microsoft Visual Studio Extensibility contest’s managed package category. XPathmania extends Visual Studio’s XML Editor by adding support to test your XPath queries against the open XML document.
I thought I had a great time slot (on the first day while everyone is still fresh and in the mood to learn), until I saw the list of other speakers in that slot: Don Smith, Brian Noyes, Itzik Ben-Gan, Russ Fustino, Harry Pierson, Thomas Rizzo, Patrick Hynds, Duane Laflotte, Molly Holzschlag (just to mention a few). Damn, what competition! Actually, the coolest thing was going over to the TechEd website and seeing my name in the list of speakers. That was a weird feeling.
With all the other great sessions to tempt you not to attend my session, all I can say is it might be in your best interest to skip the other sessions on Monday at 1:15PM, and check out mine. The other sessions, they might be able to help you write some better code for work, but how many of the other sessions can actually help teach to write an extension for Visual Studio? None! What can you do with this knowledge? Well, we all spend lots of time in Visual Studio, and I'm sure there are lots of little improvements/enhancements to it you would love to make, but didn't know how to go about it. There may even be plenty of other developers willing to spend $35-$50 for your new improvement (tool window, designer, language enhancement, etc.). Just because I gave my product away for free, doesn't mean you have to do the same. Why not start up your very own micro-ISV? You have probably listened to Hansleminutes Show #47, How to start your own MicroISV, well, here is your opportunity. If you don't someone else that decided to attend my session might just beat you to all that money you can make as a microISV selling that really cool tool for Visual Studio that you didn't develop because you didn't learn how to build managed packages for Visual Studio.
Yes, I know it is a reach, but you never know, it just may happen, so why risk it?