How To Create Your Own Plugin For Visual Studio?

By Author: John Wilkins
Total Articles: 1
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Every programmer must have thought at least once of creating his/her own small plugin to his/her favorite development environment. It doesn't matter what operating system, programming language or development environment you use - it's possible to write plugins almost to everything nowadays. Note that many companies encourage creating plugins for their environments. For instance, Microsoft is developing the Visual Studio Gallery website where a great many of plugins are laid out among which everyone can pick out something useful.
Wandering around the Visual Studio plugins gallery you cannot but feel an urge to create something on your own. There may be different motives: improve one's everyday work, or conquer routine operations. Or just for fun. But in order to write such a plugin you'll have to find out how it is done. There are several ways to do this. You can read the official documentation by Microsoft. To be exact, you certainly should do that! But sometimes you want to read materials written by plugins' authors themselves - from the horse's mouth, so to say. The point is that the official documentation tells you ...
... how it should be, while some plugin developers' notes tell you how it actually is.
What for am I telling you this all? Well, we've published a new course called "Developing extension packages for Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010/2012 using C# with real-life samples" ( http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/477550/Developing-extension-packages-for-Visual-Studio-20 ) recently. Unlike "classic" textbooks/manuals, these articles describe real-life experience of programmers who have been developing plugins for several years and are already familiar with all the subtleties of this kind of software development. You must admit that it unfortunately happens from time to time that behavior described in the documentation is different from the real one.
So, we recommend that all of you interested in plugin development, C# programming and just listening to real-life stories told by developers themselves read the articles and add them to bookmarks.