
Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools Open-Sourced - marzz0
https://github.com/Microsoft/VS-PPT
======
latishsehgal
This is great! As somebody who's worked with Extending Visual Studio before,
it's always great to have some more code samples to dig through. Outside of
simple scenarios, I usually have to decompile the VS dlls to figure out what's
going on.

~~~
cLeEOGPw
Can you tell an example problem that you solved by decompiling visual studio
dll(s)?

~~~
latishsehgal
Sure. I built a SSMS (based on Visual Studio shell, so same code) extension
called SqlSmash www.sqlsmash.com. Half the features in there have made me dig
into stuff like that. The latest example was trying to get a handle on the
query results grid so that I can use the data in there.

------
simoncion
"Note that this repository currently contains a subset of all extensions in
Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2015. This subset represents
extensions which we believe can serve as great real world samples of extending
Visual Studio." [0]

Yep. _There 's_ the rub.

Also, as a bit of trivia, the first substantial commit was back in December
[1]. The next commit was ~5 days ago.

Edit: Additionally, this is their committer policy:

"Contributions beyond the level of a bug fix are reserved for Microsoft PPT
members or they will be declined." [2]

So, if you've something substantial to add, you don't get to _actually_
contribute to the repo.

[0] [https://github.com/Microsoft/VS-
PPT/wiki/Overview](https://github.com/Microsoft/VS-PPT/wiki/Overview)

[1] [https://github.com/Microsoft/VS-
PPT/commit/a243e09441d29b9f4...](https://github.com/Microsoft/VS-
PPT/commit/a243e09441d29b9f4c42f4a4ea653329dd8ca8d7)

[2] [https://github.com/Microsoft/VS-
PPT/blob/a243e09441d29b9f4c4...](https://github.com/Microsoft/VS-
PPT/blob/a243e09441d29b9f4c42f4a4ea653329dd8ca8d7/CONTRIBUTING.md)

~~~
timsneath
Sorry about the contributions text - that's a little unartfully expressed. Our
plan in open sourcing these extensions was both to provide some useful
examples of extending Visual Studio and to be a starting point for others to
create and manage new extensions based on this work.

We wanted to get these out as open source first and foremost, and we're really
interested in learning how people use them. Our conservatism in accepting
contributions springs out of that goal. If it's clear that there's strong
interest in developing these further, we're willing to revisit that.

And just in response to the trivia, we switched the entire Visual Studio repo
to git, hosted on Visual Studio Team Services, after we shipped Visual Studio
2015. We've been developing VS-PPT in that repo before moving it to GitHub, so
hopefully that explains the long gap in the commit history.

We're listening! Thanks, Tim Sneath | Visual Studio Team

~~~
simoncion
> And just in response to the trivia...

Oh, that wasn't directed at you, it was directed at the HN submitter and his
choice of title. The history of _my_ project repos is shot through with huge
sections where nothing at all happens. That's just how these things go.

> We're listening!

Good! I hope your corporate overlords let you meaningfully act on the feedback
that you receive and -more crucially- _continue_ to act on that feedback for
_decades_ after the PR halo subsides.

I guess we'll see what happens in the upcoming half-decade or two. :)

