Automation and Extensibility for Visual Studio

You can extend Visual Studio by using add-ins, VSPackages, and Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) extensions.

You can use add-ins in Visual Studio without installing the Visual Studio Software Development Kit (SDK).

However, to use VSPackages and the Managed Extensibility Framework, you must install the Visual Studio SDK. For information about how to download the Visual Studio SDK, see Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Center on the MSDN Web site.

For information about how to extend Visual Studio by using the Visual Studio SDK, see Developing Visual Studio Extensions on the MSDN Web site.

In This Section

• Extending the Visual Studio Environment
  Links to topics that explain the various ways to extend and automate the IDE.

• Extending Visual Basic and Visual C# Projects
  Links to topics that explain how to use the Visual Basic and Visual C# project automation model.

• Visual C++ Extensibility Object Model
  Links to topics about the Visual C++ Code Model, Visual C++ Wizard Model, Visual C++ Project/Build model, and the Visual C++ Resource Editor model. Includes language reference for these automation object models.

• Visual Web Developer Extensibility
  Links to topics that explain how to use Visual Web Developer extensibility.

• Automation and Extensibility Reference_
  Links to reference topics for the automation models.