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Extending the Visual Studio Environment

Although Visual Studio offers many tools and the power to accomplish almost every task, you may require an additional or finer level of control. For example, you may want to automate a task or a series of tasks that you perform regularly. Or you may have designed tools that you want to use in the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE).

Visual Studio includes Automation object models, which are rich programming models that let you automate the IDE and also provide extensions and new features to it. Each model concentrates on a particular area of the IDE, such as the tool windows, the code editor, the various projects, and so forth.

The sections below introduce you to automation and extensibility and show you how to use them to make programming easier.

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