Chapter 57. Introducing the Visual Studio Extensibility

Visual Studio is with no doubt a great application, offering hundreds of integrated tools that cover hundreds of aspects of the development experience. It is also a complex and composite application, made of components. For example, each tool window is a single component developed separately and then put together with the rest of the environment. Developing Visual Studio components and then putting them together is something made possible because of Visual Studio Extensibility. This means that Visual Studio is an extensible application and that other developers, like you and me, can build their own components to be put together within the IDE. Although, as mentioned before, Visual Studio offers hundreds of tools that covers many development needs, it cannot cover all possible requirements; with regard to this, one of the biggest benefits inside the Visual Studio development environment is that you can customize it with additional tools, windows, and items that can make your developer life even easier. In this chapter you get started with the Visual Studio 2010 extensibility, building custom components, and also taking a tour of what is new in the 2010 version.