December 7th, 2021

How Can We Improve Extensibility in Visual Studio?

Leslie Richardson
Program Manager

We are working on exciting, major updates to how extensions are written and used in Visual Studio, and it’s a long road to completing them.  In the meantime, we’d love your ideas on what we can do in the more immediate future to improve how you use or write extensions.  To share your feedback on how we can make your experience better, please complete this brief survey.

 

In case you missed it, Mads Kristensen and I also recently chatted on the Hacking Visual Studio show about your incoming extensibility feedback and how we can improve the space.

 

Extensions are a huge part of what makes an essential development environment in Visual Studio for many of you, so it’s our goal to help expand and improve the extensibility community to help you become even more productive.

Author

Leslie Richardson
Program Manager

Leslie is a Program Manager on the C# developer experience team, focusing primarily on improving the overall .NET and C# productivity experience and feature set.

3 comments

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  • Stuart Ballard

    It’s probably a very niche topic, but the thing I’ve always wanted to extend in Visual Studio is to add syntax highlighting and maybe eventually intellisense for a custom file format. I’ve not had any luck finding good ‘getting started’ documentation for that particular kind of extensibility – most of the documentation seems focused on adding new tools and menu items.

    • Mads KristensenMicrosoft employee

      This is the next topic I’m going to write samples and base classes for. I hope to make it super easy

    • Rand Random

      IMHO

      Looking at Visual Studio Code I highly doubt that it is a niche Topic, it may be niche for VS because it is either impossible or cumbersome to do.

      I strongly believe if Visual Studio Code didn’t have this capability it wouldn’t be nearly as popular.