Jared's space

I read through all of the walkthroughs on MSDN about extending Visual Studio. Let me tell you there are a lot of them. One of the nice features of Visual Studio (at least VS 2010) is that when you are debugging a VSIX project it will automatically launch an instance of Visual Studio with your extension registered and installed in an “Experimental” instance of Visual Studio. This is great. I’m glad the Visual Studio team thought this through.

Tonight I came to the point where I’m pretty confident about my extension and want to actually install it. This way I can use it and flush out any bugs in real life use. I read and read and searched and searched and was not able to find any walkthrough that went through the step of graduating your Visual Studio extension from Experimental to Production. Part of the reason why is because it’s really easy to do. I am now going to spell out how easy it is.

Go to the project output. Next to the extensions .dll and .pdb files will be a .vsix file. Double click on the vsix file to install (register) the extension with Visual Studio 2010.

(I can’t believe I wasted a whole evening on that)