Plugins, DirectX, and other languages

OK can anything plug into Express Editions and can it open, say Office projects or DirectX ones at all

If each Express Edition is a different separate tool another language wouldn't plug in it'd be a whole extra program Would/Could that work that way

Also when will microsoft make a plug-in for Visual Modelling that doesn't require ultra-expensive Enterprise Architect Edition with all the bells and whistles, I tend to think it'd be a good tool for beginner OOP designers to learn visually how to make classes and then plug that convert into code... I don't understand why they haven't made a slimline Visio (Visio express ) or (like Organization Chart Maker in some Office Versions) a diagram plugin/feature for this stuff that doesn't require all the extra cash and business/developer tools... (or should I just get the community vers of Visual Paradigm for UML and forget about it from MS )

Sidenote: aside from the rumors I've heard about some bigwig at Microsoft being set to perhaps build Python (check out IronPython) into CLR so perhaps Python will be next Visual Studio language ... (then again theres a cLisp interpreter sample in VS.NET)

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Plugins, DirectX, and other languages

Dorsk
ForgeAus -

Many of the methods of extending Visual Studio have been made unavailable in Express to make sure that the tools stay simple and approachable. There are a few places you can plug in:

Tools menu - Go to Tools->External Tools... to add any useful tools directly to the menu in Express. You can also pass information like the current project path and others to the tool to make this integration richer.

Project templates - You can create your own project templates by creating a project and then using File->Export Template... to create a template you can share with others. This allows you to create project templates built specifically for DirectX development for example.

As for a modelling tool in Express, we won't have this for VS2005. We thought long and hard about this, and we definitely agree that there is value in having this for Express users, but we had to keep the feature set to a reasonably small size to really keep the product simple. I'm sure we'll take another look at this for the next version.

Sidenote: There are actually a ton of .NET languages available. Take a look at http://www.dotnetpowered.com/languages.aspx for a (probably not even complete) list.

Thanks,
Luke Hoban
Visual C# IDE Program Manager
Plugins, DirectX, and other languages

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