When you get the January 2007 edition of the MSDN Magazine, if you flip to pages 76-79 you will find a special "sponsor content" section that includes interviews of Dave Donaldson and myself, plus some information about our extensions to Visual Studio, CodeKeep and XPathmania. My interview was given way back in early October, via a phone conversation, and I have to say, it is strange to see it in MSDN Magazine. There are a couple typos (I thanked Chris Lovett and Stan Kitsis, not Sam Druker whom I don't know, but is probably a great guy from the stuff I've read or saw on/by him), and over in Dave's interview a Dave Demsak was mentioned, and I'm sure that was referring to me, but I'm not complaining. It was an honor (and very cool) to get an "interview" in the magazine, even if it is mostly an ad. Its purpose is to let people know that you (the developers using Visual Studio), can improve your own experience with Visual Studio by creating your own extensions. Hopefully it will succeed in doing just that, and maybe even raise the awareness of the CodeKeep and XPathmania projects. In my interview I got my plugs in for XPathmania, plus for the developer community in New Jersey (which was brought up in Dave's interview, because, well, he is from Ohio, and I'm sure they have a great developer community, too). Anyone that reads this blog regularly probably already knows most of my background (the sappy stuff like how I got into programming, and that I like metal music), and the local Jersey folks know that I'd like to make New Jersey into Redmond East. Plus I got my plug in for LINQ. But I'm sure the average MSDN Magazine reader, if they are that bored and happen to read those pages, will be wonder who these guys (Dave Donaldson and Don Demsak) are, and why did they get an "interview" in the magazine. Hopefully, they are curious enough to do an Internet search and find our sites, and maybe even get exposed to the wonderful world of the .Net bloggers that are out there.
As part of the XPathmania development process, I had written an article on how to extend Visual Studio (at least, how I extended it for XPathmania), and some of the quirks that is the life of anyone that has to deal with nasty COM-interop. I wrote the article (and XPathmana) using the April 2006 Visual Studio SDK. Since that time, there has been another (and I think final) release of the SDK in Sept. I need to upgrade XPathmania to the Sept 2006 SDK, and then adjust the article. There was some discussion about actually publishing it in MSDN magazine, but the lead time for those articles are so long, that I'm not sure it will be worth the wait, and I may just publish it on the web somewhere. If anyone is struggling with the VS SDK, and wants to get the current copy of the article,contact me, and I'll send it to you.