My small add-in for Visual Studio to help you debug your Silverlight applications had problems running on Visual Studio 2012 RC. It installed correctly but did not show up in the respective menu, and wasn't able to do its work either. Time to introduce some changes I wanted to do for a long time anyway!

The Debug Helper now is a Visual Studio Extension rather than an add-in, and can be installed directly from the Extension Manager from within Visual Studio, or downloaded from the Visual Studio Gallery here:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/b5f1634e-1608-4376-8f00-caf93f5f58c8

Of course, the source code is still available through CodePlex, on the project's hompage:

http://sldebughelper.codeplex.com/

There you can also find more documentation and information on the motivation to create the extension. Things that have changed in the new version besides the packaging:

• Made detecting Silverlight projects more robust.
• Made selecting the Silverlight debug engine more robust.

The extension has been tested on both Visual Studio 2010 and 2012. If you run into any issues, please feel free to contact me, preferably on CodePlex.

Almost two years ago, Firefox started to isolate plug-ins like Silverlight in a separate operating system process. One of the consequences was that debugging Silverlight applications with Visual Studio became somewhat more tedious, because the Silverlight debug engine was not able to automatically attach to the correct processes anymore. At that time, I started developing a small and simple Visual Studio Add-In named "Firefox Debug Helper". Later on, when I discovered that Visual Studio also had problems with other browsers like Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome, I extended support for this Add-In to these browsers, and renamed the tool to "Silverlight Debug Helper".

Today, the topic is still relevant for Silverlight developers, and this small tool continues to serve me and others well. Every now and then, someone asks for the source code of the Debug Helper Add-In, either to learn about how to extend Visual Studio by a practical example, to extend the existing features, or because they want to track down issues when they use the Add-In. I'm pleased to announce that starting today, the source code of the "Silverlight Debug Helper" is available for free to everyone (the tool itself always was available for free from the first day) on CodePlex. It's not very sophisticated and probably could be improved in some areas, but I still hope those of you interested in it can make good use from this release. The new project page also is the place where new releases will be made available at, if applicable:

http://sldebughelper.codeplex.com

This also means that the existing project page here on this blog will be suspended and link to the new home on CodePlex from now on.

YLAD

Today, I've also released a new version of "Your Last About Dialog" for Windows Phone. This new release adds support for trial mode, which means that a "buy" button is automatically added to the about page if you are using this feature of Windows Phone. As always, I've tried to make the default behavior suitable for most scenarios, so you usually don't have to worry about it – it simply will work "out of the box". But if you want to override the default behavior and either force the buy button feature both on or off for your particular scenario, YLAD offers the flexibility to do so. The new version is already available on CodePlex and (recommended) NuGet, and in addition improves the default configuration template as well as fixes a potential bug with multiple successive taps on the "review" button of the about page. Learn more about the release and the new features on the project page and its documentation section:

http://ylad.codeplex.com

Have fun ;)