Learn How to Extend Visual Studio

Millions of developers in both small and large enterprises use Visual Studio to more easily use the latest platform technology to revolutionize the way they build, maintain, and deploy today’s complex business applications. Visual Studio supports a rich, diverse ecosystem of developers who ship thousands of Visual Studio integrated products to make it easy for Visual Studio users to use their favorite tool their way.

And if someone else hasn’t created it, you can -- the Visual Studio SDK is freely available to the developer community and contains everything you need to extend Visual Studio. With Visual Studio, you’ll find new opportunities to build extensions for specific development needs. These include the Visual Studio Shell, a foundational IDE for custom tools and programming languages, Domain-Specific Language (DSL) tools, a set of tools to help you create graphical models that generate code, and support for Visual Basic within the Visual Studio SDK.  Released on a quarterly basis, each new version of the Visual Studio SDK delivers improved tools, samples, and documentation to extend your development experience.

Here you'll discover a wealth of resources for learning how to extend Visual Studio for both the beginner and the experienced developer.

Extend the IDE Learn how to extend the project system, extend the editor, create custom wizards, and more . . . Automation and IDE Extensibility Introduction to Automation and IDE Extensibility VSPackages and Deployment How Do I: Add A Dialog Page to Configure a VSPackage? StickyNotes Project System Project System Overview Solutions Overview Custom Wizards Source Control Visual Studio Add-ins, Templates, and Wizards Debugger Visual Studio Debugger Extensibility How Do I: Create a Debugger Visualizer VSX: The Debugging Automation Model Visual Studio Debug Engine Sample DB Connection Visualizer Editors Getting Started with Editors Introduction to Language Services How Do I: Create a Multi-View Editor in Visual Studio? Using the Package Wizard to create an Editor Package in VS Source Code Outliner PowerToy User Interface Working with User Interfaces Toolbox and Controls Menus and Toolbars Tool Windows Document Windows Help Authoring and Integration Getting Started with Help Content and Integration How Do I: Create Additional Help Files for Visual Studio Sandcastle Overview

DSL Tools Learn how to use DSL Tools in the Visual Studio SDK to build graphical models to generate code. Getting Started with DSL Tools Domain-Specific Development in Visual Studio DSL Tools How Do I: Get Started with the Visual Studio Domain Specific Languages? Storyboard Designer Visual Studio SDK Introduction content for learning to create packages and Visual Studio Shell applications using the Visual Studio SDK. Getting Started with the Visual Studio SDK Creating and Distributing Packages with the Visual Studio SDK VSX Architecture Visual Studio Shell If you create a custom tool that would benefit from having an integrated development environment (IDE), you may consider building on the Visual Studio Shell. Visual Studio Shell-Based Applications Introduction to the Visual Studio 2008 Shell Integrating Languages in the Visual Studio Shell Build Tools for Any Platform with the Visual Studio 2008 Shell Team System Extensibility Learn about the broad range of customizations and integration options available with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. Getting Started with TFS Extensibility How Do I: Automate Team Build? How Do I: Create and Manage Workspaces Using Team Foundation Server Control?

Videos, Articles and Books How Do I Videos Videos and Webcasts Technical Articles Books Additional Learning Materials VSX CoDe Focus Magazine Microsoft sponsored this special edition of CoDe Magazine on the topic of VSX. VSX Samples on Code Gallery Reference VSX related code snippets, samples, and deep dive documents. VSX UE Team Blog VSX User Education team blog with tutorials, walkthroughs, documentation previews, and tips. LearnVSXNow! Series of tutorial technical articles by MVP Istvan Novak for learning VSX related topics.