Editor and language service extensions

Applies to: Visual Studio Visual Studio for Mac

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

You can extend most features of the Visual Studio code editor. The editor is based on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and is written in managed code. Although this design differs from the designs in earlier versions of Visual Studio, it provides most of the same features. To extend the editor, use the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).

The Visual Studio SDK provides adapters known as shims to support VSPackages that were written for earlier versions. Nevertheless, if you have an existing VSPackage, we recommend that you update it to the new technology to obtain better performance and reliability.

Related topics

Title	Description
Create an extension with an editor item template	Introduction to using the Editor item templates.
Extend the editor and language services	Links to documents that introduce the design and features of the core editor and show how to extend it.
Legacy interfaces in the editor	Links to documents that explain how to access the core editor from existing code.
Create custom editors and designers	Links to documents that explain how to create custom editors.
Legacy language service extensibility	Links to documents that describe how to integrate programming languages into Visual Studio.
Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)	Introduces the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).
Windows Presentation Foundation	Introduces the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).