As Visual Studio 2010 IDE has been mostly written in WPF, extending the start page has become pretty darn easy and I for one find this quite interesting as I always open with the start page and the more customisation I can have the better!

There are a few things you will need to install first to get going

• Visual Studio 2010 SDK
• Start page project template, which you can either get from the New Project dialog, in the online gallery section in VS or download from here

I was going to write a blog post on how to create a custom start page, but decided that msdn have done such a good job I was pretty much wasting my time, so take a look here, it has in detail everything you need to know to get it done! :)