Visual Studio Blog

The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

Extensibility - Visual Studio Blog

Writing extensions just got easier

November 16, 2021 Nov 16, 2021 11/16/21
Mads Kristensen
In collaboration with the open source community, we’re introducing a new toolkit for writing Visual Studio extensions. Extensions used to be difficult to write, but the new toolkit makes it easier than ever. The toolkit consists of brand-new tooling inside Visual Studio as well as new APIs to code against. It’s all included in the free ...

Learn to write Visual Studio extensions

October 13, 2021 Oct 13, 2021 10/13/21
Mads Kristensen
Writing extension for Visual Studio can be a daunting task for even the seasoned developer. Figuring out where to start is a not obvious and the whole process a bit mysterious. At least, that’s what you’ve told over the years from trying to write extensions. That’s why we’re now introducing a new video series to make extension writing ...

Avoiding Memory Leaks in Visual Studio Editor Extensions

September 24, 2021 Sep 24, 2021 09/24/21
Christian Gunderman
Visual Studio extenders make VS even better by augmenting it with specialized tools, new languages, and workflows. As a Visual Studio extender, you can ensure your extension’s customers have the most performant, reliable experience possible by avoiding common sources of memory leaks, described within this blog post. Background In the early...

Live coding Visual Studio extensions

August 17, 2020 Aug 17, 2020 08/17/20
Mads Kristensen
Writing extension for Visual Studio can be a challenging affair. It also happens to be extremely satisfying and a lot of fun. But even with our getting-started guidance, there is still a lot to learn, explore, and keeping up with. After 10 years and over 130 extensions, I still learn something new every time I write an extension. So why not ...

Use Visual Studio in Presentation Mode

August 10, 2020 Aug 10, 2020 08/10/20
Mads Kristensen
Have you ever seen a presentation using Visual Studio, but had a hard time seeing the too-small fonts in the editor, Solution Explorer and menu system? How about all the custom extensions and themes the presenter used, making it harder to figure out what exactly was going on? Perhaps you were the presenter? Here’s how Visual Studio ...