Visual Studio Extensibility QuickStart Tutorials

The QuickStart Tutorials are a series of documentation that is designed to quickly acquaint developers with the programming model, architecture and the power of the Visual Studio extensibility platform. They are not designed to present each concept in its full detail, but they will demonstrate how to add each feature step-by-step and provide pointers to more comprehensive topics as appropriate. The tutorials are designed to be short, easy-to-understand illustrations of the extensibility features in Visual Studio.  When a user has completed the QuickStart Tutorials, they should have good starting point for developing various types of VS extensions.

Goals

1. Acquaint developers with the programming model, architecture and the power of the Visual Studio extensibility platform.
2. Builds confidence for the developers who are new to Visual Studio Extensibility, and provide pointers to more advanced and comprehensive topics.

Assumed Experience

The QuickStart tutorials are targeted at developers who are new to Visual Studio Extensibility, but they are not designed for new programmers. They assume that the developer is familiar with C#, COM Interop and has familiarity with Visual Studio.

QuickStart Tutorials Organization

The QuickStart tutorials are organized in several trails to explore various extensibility areas that the Visual Studio platform offers. Within each trail is a series of tutorials that present concepts and tasks with increasing complexity. Although the code samples used in the tutorials may not depend on each other, the tutorials within a trail are designed to be taken in sequence for maximum benefit. Each tutorial makes abundant use of sample code to illustrate how to accomplish a series of tasks in a step-by-step manner.

The following outlines the tutorial contents.

Basic IDE Trail

The Basic IDE Trail contains tutorials about how to integrate VSPackages into the Visual Studio IDE.

Tutorial 1: Getting Started with Visual Studio Extensibility

This introduction to the Visual Studio extensibility model presents the three levels of extensibility offered by Visual Studio and discusses the suitability of each under various circumstances. If you are new to Visual Studio Extensibility, start here. View the Tutorial

Tutorial 2: Creating Your First VSPackage

This tutorial teaches how to use a Wizard to add a simple command to the menu in Visual Studio. Next, the tutorial shows how to add a shortcut key to the command. The tutorial also shows how to add custom branding to the Visual Studio splash screen and About dialog box, and shows how to obtain and use a package load key (PLK). View the Tutorial

Tutorial 3: Creating Your First Tool Window

This tutorial demonstrates how to create a tool window inside Visual Studio. Using the media player control as an example, it will show how to embed a control within the tool window. We will also show how to add a command bar into the tool window to control playback and how to register the tool window for default placement. View the Tutorial

Tutorial 4: Interacting with the Tool Window

This tutorial teaches how to interact with a custom tool window and the content it contains. By building on a previous tutorial that taught how to embed a Media Player control in a tool window, this tutorial shows how to add controls to manage playback of a simple playlist. The tutorial also shows how to add a playlist management command to a Visual Studio menu in such a way that the command is visible only when the custom tool window has focus. View the Tutorial

Tutorial 5: Integrating with the Properties Window, Task List, Output Window and Options Dialog

This tutorial teaches how to integrate with the Visual Studio Task List, Options dialog box, and Output window by showing how to build a simple task manager composed of several controls. By using this task manager, a user can add new tasks that will populate the Task List and Output window. Added tasks can be edited in the Visual Studio Properties window. The tutorial also shows how to add a new page to the Options dialog box. View the Tutorial

Tutorial 6: Integrating with Help

This tutorial teaches how to create conceptual topics by using Innovasys HelpStudio Lite. The tutorial also shows how to integrate topics into the Visual Studio Help system. The tutorial then shows how to link the documentation to the product by using F1 keywords. View the Tutorial