Brennan’s Blog

Professional Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) by Keyvan Nayyeri has been released. This book covers pretty much everything you will want to know about extending Visual Studio. I received several copies of the book which I will be sharing with the local .NET User Groups at our coming conference, Deeper in .NET.

The primary topics you will want to learn about VSX are how to create an add-in or a package and deploy it to Visual Studio. These topics are covered extensively but the book also goes into other modern topics like domain specific languages (DSL) which are enabling very powerful applications. A good example of what you can do with DSLs is DSLFactory Utilities.

I have not had a chance to read much, but at a glance I cannot see anything that is missing. What I really want to know is how to traverse solutions, projects and project items and then manipulate them so I can add generated files to projects transparently. These details appear to be covered in depth. After reading about nightmares in doing VSX I have actually found that it is not as bad as I thought it would be. I created custom tools and a VSPackage before these books arrived but that work was difficult as I had to dig through a great deal of documentation on MSDN that was not always complete or even accurate for the latest version of Visual Studio. This book is focused on Visual Studio 2008 which will definitely save me a lot of time and effort.

What I have learned I have presented to the Milwaukee and Madison .NET User Groups. My presentation in Madison covered working with Visual Studio 2008 and while I covered how to create and deploy a custom VSPackage I still have many questions that I hope this book will answer. I will write up a review once I have had a chance to go through the book.