Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 made it possible to use the PackageReference syntax to reference NuGet packages in Visual Studio Extensibility (VSIX) projects. This makes it much simpler to reason about NuGet packages and opens the door for having a complete meta package containing the entire VSSDK. Before using PackageReference, here’s what the...

Recently, I’ve updated over 30 of my extensions to support Visual Studio 2019 (16.0). To make sure they work, I got my hands on a very early internal build of VS 2019 to test with (working on the Visual Studio team has its benefits). This upgrade process is one of the easiest I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to share my steps with you to show jus...

I’m often asked how to best learn to build Visual Studio extensions, so here is what I wished someone told me before I got started. Don’t skip the introduction It’s easy to create a new extensibility project in Visual Studio, but unless you understand the basics of how the extensibility system works, then you are setting yourself up for failure. ...

The Visual Studio team partners with extension authors to provide a productive development environment for users, who rely on a rich ecosystem of quality extensions. Today, we're introducing an update to extension auto load based on feedback from our community of developers, who need to quickly start Visual Studio and load their solution while defe...