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Customizing and Extending Visual Studio

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There are lots of ways to customize and extend Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to help you be more efficient and productive as you create solutions and tools for yourself and others.

When we discuss customizing Visual Studio, we generally refer to changing the overall behavior of existing features built in to Visual Studio. For example, you can do things like customize how shortcut keys are bound to Visual Studio commands or show or hide Visual Studio toolbars and windows. Documentation for customizing Visual Studio 2005 is included with the product.

When we discuss extending Visual Studio, we generally refer to three areas: macros, add-ins and wizards, and advanced integration.

Generally speaking, macros allow you to manipulate Visual Studio programmatically to perform routine or repetitive tasks. For example, you could record macro code that executes a series of keystrokes repeatedly.

Add-ins and wizards also allow you to manipulate Visual Studio, but in a way more tightly integrated into the visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Add-ins can appear as menu commands and buttons in the IDE, and they are compiled, so they protect your intellectual property. Unlike macros, add-ins and wizards run in-process with Visual Studio, giving them access to more automation functionality such as build automation or adding custom pages to the Tools Options dialog box.

Documentation for using automation and creating macros, add-ins, and wizards for Visual Studio 2005 is also included with the product.

For advanced Visual Studio 2005 integration, such as integrating new programming languages, custom code editors and solution designers, new solution project types, custom code debuggers, and custom productivity tools, you should consult the Visual Studio 2005 SDK.

Note that Visual Studio 2005 editions support extensibility features in different ways. For more information, see the "Extensibility" section of the Visual Studio 2005 Product Line Overview.

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-- Paul

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