Extending Visual Studio Overview

Visual Studio 2012

The Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) provides the user interface (UI) for standard components, such as compilers, editors, and debuggers. Features like Visual C++ and Visual Basic that are included with Visual Studio are themselves extensions of the IDE. The Visual Studio SDK provides tools, samples, wizards, designers, and documentation that helps you develop your own applications that extend the IDE and integrate seamlessly with it.

In This Section

Getting Started with the Visual Studio SDK: Provides an overview of the Visual Studio SDK.
User Experience Guidelines for Visual Studio: Provides guidelines for creating user interfaces for Visual Studio extensions.
Visual Studio IDE Architecture: Describes Visual Studio and its IDE, and introduces strategies and techniques for extending the IDE.
VSIX Deployment: Describes how to use the VSIX format to package SDK projects. The VSIX format uses file-based deployment and does not support writing to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) or to the system registry.
Creating a Software Development Kit: Explains how to use a VSIX project to create your own SDK.
Shell (Integrated or Isolated): Explains how to create a custom tool that has its own integrated development environment (IDE). The Visual Studio Shell provides a hierarchal project system, integration with editors and designers, source code control, and a familiar user interface that may reduce the learning curve for end users.
User Interfaces: Explains how to use Visual Studio services to create UI elements that match the rest of Visual Studio.
Projects and Solutions: Describes how to use Visual Studio projects and solutions to organize code files and resource files, and how to implement source control.
Reference Manager Extensibility: Explains how to extend the Reference Manager.
Editors: Describes how to extend the Visual Studio editor and how to create custom editors.
Language Services: Describes how you can add support for a new programming language to Visual Studio.
Visual Studio Debugger Extensibility: Describes how you can support debugging for a custom language.
Data Designer Extensibility (DDEX) SDK: Provides documentation, samples, and resources to help you implement a DDEX provider for exposing third-party data source objects in Visual Studio.
Visual Studio Extensibility Samples: Describes how to obtain Visual Studio Extensibility samples.
Walkthroughs for Customizing Visual Studio By Using VSPackages: Describes how to create a basic VSPackage.

Related Sections

Visual Studio Software Development Kit (SDK): Provides a gateway to documentation, samples, and code to help you develop products that integrate with the Visual Studio product family.
Visual Studio: Discusses how to develop applications by using Visual Studio. Includes sections about how to extend the Visual Studio IDE by using add-ins.