In this How Do I Series, I will post about the Editor and Language Service Extensions in Visual Studio.
You can use editor extensions to add language service features such as outlining, brace matching, IntelliSense, and light bulbs to your own programming language or to any content type. You can also customize the appearance and behavior of the Visual Studio editor, for example text coloring, margins, adornments, and other visual elements. You can also define your own type of content, and specify the appearance and behavior of the text views in which your content appears.
To get started writing editor extensions, use the editor project templates that are installed as part of the Visual Studio SDK. The Visual Studio SDK is a downloadable set of tools that make it easier to develop Visual Studio extensions, either by using VSPackages or by using the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).
For more information about the Visual Studio SDK, see Visual Studio SDK.
You can insulate your working version of Visual Studio while you are developing an extension by deploying it in the following experimental folder (on Windows Vista and Windows 7):
%LOCALAPPDATA%\VisualStudio\10.0Exp\Extensions\Company\ExtensionID
where %LOCALAPPDATA% is the name of the logged-on user, Company is the name of the company that owns the extension, and ExtensionID is the ID of the extension.
When you deploy an extension to the experimental location, it runs in debug mode. A second instance of Visual Studio is started, and is named Microsoft Visual Studio – Experimental Instance.
Stay Tuned for more posts 🙂