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I've been given the task of developing some extensions for Visual Studio for our internal use. These will have to support a couple of different versions of Visual Studio (VS2008, 2010 and 2012 - VS2005 would be a nice to have but not essential). I'd like to develop these in as consistent a way as possible, reusing as much of the code as possible, while fitting it into the existing project structure for these kinds of tools, which is a Visual Studio 2012 .sln.

What's the best / easiest way of developing this kind of extension? A VSPackage project? Can I make a 2008-compatible VSPackage which is developed in VS2012?

The features I will need for the extensions I'm writing at the moment are pretty basic - I need to create Tools menu commands, possibly a custom toolwindow. My requirements might change later on but I don't need editor adornments or anything like that at the moment.

I saw this question which might seem to be a duplicate, but the answer which was accepted doesn't answer the question, so...

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JohnL
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1 Answers1

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It really depends on what is your extension going to do.

VS2008 does not support extensions (.vsix) and you will need to write VSPackage deployed as msi for it. You also won't have access to many new features introduced in VS2010 (easier editor integration and access to vs services via MEF), but basic stuff such as manipulating solution/project/files should be fine and work on all versions (e.g. using DTE should be ok).

As far as I remember for VS2008 you will also need to obtain a PLK, which is no longer required for 2010 and 2012.

I haven't tried developing 2008 package in VS2012, but you definitely can develop 2010 extension in 2012.

Also remember that VS2008 is .Net 3.5, so your code should use .net 3.5 and version of c# which it supports to be portable.

Jarek Kardas
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  • My requiremnts at the moment are pretty basic - tools menu commands, maybe a toolwindow (updated the question with that info). I may have more advanced requirements later like adornments, but by then we should be on VS2012. The PLK thing may kill the chances of reusing code tho – JohnL Nov 21 '12 at 17:45
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    PLK is only needed for VS2008 to load your package, code should still be reusable though. AFAIK adding tool menu commands and tool windows works the same across all three versions of VS. One thing you can do is to have different projects for each VS you are targeting (VS2010 and VS2012 would be .vsix while VS2008 would have MSI deployment) and share files as links between them, this should make deployment/debugging easier for 2010-12 (thanks to .vsix) and each project can target different .net version (2008-3.5, 2010-4.0, 2012-4.5). – Jarek Kardas Nov 21 '12 at 21:06
  • Yeah I knew about the different deployment technologies, and I'm well-versed in MSI. Regarding that kind of project setup, I've seen that done with other projects, though our build guy won't be happy :). Also we do the sharing-files-as-links thing elsehwere and it confuses the heck outta VS/TFS. I'd prefer to have a project for each VS version (all in the same sln) that contains references to a common project which has the actual addin code. But what works, works I guess – JohnL Nov 21 '12 at 21:12
  • I ended up just developing 3 separate addins. Thanks – JohnL Nov 23 '12 at 11:08