Quite a few months ago I published a post that became quite popular about the Frustrations with command-line add-ins for Visual Studio, where it was mentioned a bug in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE which didn’t loaded command-line add-ins. Today I have found that Microsoft released a hotfix for this problem:

FIX: A command-line add-in does not load when you start the Visual Studio 2005 IDE
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934517

While it would have been better not to introduce this bug in VS 2005 SP1, it is nice that Microsoft fixed it after SP1 and the patch for Windows Vista, when VS 2008 was about to be released. It is also very very nice that you can download hotfixes without calling MS Support Services.

Now, the funny thing: the KB article says that this hotfix introduces an incompatibility with the XBox 360 SDK. It’s a good thing that I am in the Sony PS3 / PSP camp 😉

BTW, I found this hotfix while searching the list of hotfixes for Visual Studio trying to solve a very nasty problem with the VBC compiler (VB.NET) of VS 2008 that is crashing. It’s nice to see that there is a growing list of hotfixes, although none for my problem (it seems). UPDATE (8 August, 2008): I narrowed the problem to a custom attribute applied to a property and seeing the list of fixes of VS 2008 SP1 beta for VB.NET it mentions Connect ID 322131: “An application that contains a custom attribute causes the compiler to crash” so hopefully that’s my fix 🙂