Chapter 6. Visual Studio Extensibility
The Visual Studio development team continuously adds new features to this great tool from release to release. But, if you were to ask Visual Studio users if there are any features they miss, you would find only a few of them answering that they got everything. Should you ask them if they like functions and features as they are, or if they would modify them if there were a way, almost all of them would enumerate at least a dozen things to change.
Different developers like to use different approaches to development, and even change their way of working, depending on the customer or teammates they work with. You can imagine how complex it would be for the Visual Studio team to create a tool that satisfies everyone's needs. Instead of thinking about super-polished functions and features that ultimately solve all development and efficiency issues for all individuals, Visual Studio provides a great number of extensibility points to change how the IDE works, and allows adding new functionality created by third parties — including you.
Visual Studio is not just a development tool. It is a real development platform that you can customize and extend to turn it into your ultimate tool to use whether for your work or coding for fun.
This chapter provides an overview about Visual Studio extensibility to help you understand how the IDE works and how you can customize it either through configuration or programmatically. After reading this chapter, you will be ...
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