Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Editor Extension Points

The Visual Studio code editor has its own sort of API that it exposes via MEF. In other words, in MEF terms, there are a set of exports that the editor publishes that you can then use within your own MEF parts to extend the editor in virtually un-boundless ways.

With nearly 100% coverage of the editor’s features, The following feature areas are valid extension points exposed by the Visual Studio editor:

• Content types—A content type in the context of a Visual Studio code editor is the type of text and syntax that can be parsed and understood by the editor. If you think about this from a languages perspective, Visual Studio content types map directly to the various syntax and text formats that Visual Studio understands ...