Visual Studio not only boasts a wide variety of tools to improve developer productivity, but it is also extremely extensible so that it can be tailored and customized to serve specifically your needs. In fact, one of the key benefits of Visual Studio 2010 is its improved extensibility story. With an easier deployment experience, more extensive yet simpler extensibility API, and ability to create advanced visuals directly on the Editor’s surface, you can extend Visual Studio more easily and quickly than ever before!
We have many great resources to help you get started with writing Visual Studio extensions:
- Visual Studio 2010 SDK (explore at MSDN) includes project templates to help you create tool windows, menu commands, isolated shell projects, and editor extensions. The SDK also includes build tasks to help you build and debug extensions.
- Visualization and Modeling SDK (explore at MSDN) provides tools and templates for building Visual Studio Domain Specific Language designers for Visual Studio 2010 and extending UML and Layer designers. By using this SDK, you can build your own graphical or form-based designers for Visual Studio 2010 and extend existing tools.
- Visual Studio Developer Center is the nexus for any Visual Studio related information. It links to downloads, explains how to write and publish your own extensions, hosts forums to discuss best practices and development issues, points to documentation on any and all Visual Studio features, and surfaces many other useful sources of information.
- Visual Studio Extensibility Code Gallery presents many Visual Studio 2010 code samples that illustrate how to write extensions. Examples include writing your own debug engine, language service, or custom source control, among many other Debugger, Editor, Shell, Project, and MSBuild samples.
We hope these resources will be of great help to you. As always, we are happy to hear your feedback. Please comment on this blog post to do so.
Richa Prasad – Program Manager, Visual Studio Project Team
Short Bio: I am a PM on the Visual Studio Project System team. I work on many Project features such as conversion, solution load, references, project properties and others. Prior to joining Microsoft, I was a graduate student at University of Washington.
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