Visual Studio 2017 15.6 Compatibility

[lzl1918]

The start page in 15.6 is not appearing like demonstrated.

My Visual Studio reports several errors when I try to build the source code.

[Danielku15]

I will look into getting the plugin again working on the latest Update. Microsoft is always changing the internal structures which break the plugin.

To build the source you need to have old Visual Studio versions installed. To have compatibility with old VS versions I need to use some old VSSDK dlls.

[lzl1918]

The tutorial given by doc.microsoft.com of customizing a visual studio start page is quite different from this repo, which makes me quite confused. I tried to follow the tutorial, and I successfully let my page loaded and breakpoints hit when debugging in experimental env.

[Danielku15]

The documentation of creating a start page is quite outdated and often also not explaining how to ship now start pages as part of a official extension.

Also it is just the tip of the iceberg. Providing similar functionality as the default start page is quite complicated. I used to rebuild the original start page on my own but ended up with quite some styling and compatibility issue.

The plugins now works the way that it provides an own"empty" start page that is enabled for selection via the vsixmanifest.

The attached property StartPageBootstrapper.IsAttached then creates the default Visual Studio Start Page and then just replaces one area with the custom control of BetterStartPage.

The most tricky part is creating the ViewModels for the Start Page and in VS2017 Microsoft breaks the contract of those internal classes almost in every update.

[Danielku15]

I just checked again with the latest update BetterStartPage is perfectly working fine. Please be sure to update VS and the Plugin to the latest version:

[Danielku15]

Maybe as an additional info: I just published a version 1.17 which supports auto-updates of the extension.