I searched far and wide and was unable to find a good quick tutorial on getting  a Visual Studio 2010 extension up and running. There are a few things wrong in the verbiage used that can be quite confusing.

Obtaining the VS 2010 Beta 1 SDK

The first order of business is to get the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK, which will add the new templates for creating an extension.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d197feb6-ced5-40d4-949d-a51f02309ee8&displaylang=en

After downloading it and trying to install it you may run across an uncaught exception (like I did)

The error lies in the Bootstrapper (setup.exe). Since the VsSDK_sfx.exe is a self-extracting zip archive you can use your favorite unzipping utility to get the contents. (or you can take the hard way and get the files in your temp folder after it’s been unzipped). I prefer to use WinRar, it makes it extremely easy

After this there are only 5 files extracting.

We only care about 2 of them. vssdk.cab and vssdk.msi.
Launch the vssdk.msi . This is the main installer for the SDK. It gives little feedback and will auto close when it’s done installing.

Creating Your First VS2010 Extension Project

Launch Visual Studio 2010. In your New Projects dialog under <Your Language>/Extensibility you should now have “VSIX Project”

This project defines the basic extension for visual studio. Out of this you will be able to build your VSIX file for installation into Visual Studio.

After giving your new project a name you are given a barebones extension.

The Visual Studio Extension Manifest

First we’ll start off with an unfamiliar file, the extension.vsixmanifest file. This defines your extension, from title, to license agreement to pictures. While this file is a fairly simple XML file. The VS Team provided a nice interface for editing it.
 

While most of the form is pretty self explanatory, there are some specific points to make

• ID: This is your global ID for your extension. After you first publish your extension, it is probably a good idea to not change this.
• Version: this can be viewed as your installer version. It may not necessarily mirror your dll versions.
• Supported VS Editions: This is a big one and is also forward thinking. Here you can select from all the different versions of VS2010, including Express, Integrated and Isolated Shell. It can also be expanded later to include the next version of VS.

For more information on the vsixmanifest file, see the documentation http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd393700(VS.100).aspx

The last two pieces are where things get interesting. There hasn’t been much said about how extensible Extensions are in VS2010.

Under References you can create references to other VS2010 extensions that your extension may depend on. Clicking on the Add Reference button gives you this dialog.

You’re given the options to select an extension you already have installed, add an external VSIX package or manually define one and a URL to download it from. The URL part is the real beauty. When installing your Extension it has the ability to get the latest and greatest of an extension. You can of course limit it as well to certain version numbers to avoid breaking changes. This creates a lean, mean on demand Extension.

The Content editor doesn’t seem to be fully baked. Here you can add extra content into your vsix package and have it registered upon install.  One example is a registering a Project Template. I’ve borrowed an example from the Card Game Starter Kit .

The Code

You will find one lone code file in your new project. Here is the CS version

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Threading;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.ExtensibilityHosting;

/// <summary>
/// Empty VSIX Project.
/// </summary>
namespace MyFirstVs2010Extension
{

}

Not much in there. This is where your imagination comes in

Here is where I’ll leave you to fend on your own for now. Navigating the Visual Studio SDK assemblies is another post all in itself.  You’ll find all assemblies you need under the Microsoft.VisualStudio namespace in your add references dialog. It is also possible to tie into Team System via the Microsoft.TeamSystem .

For some full source examples of VS 2010 Extensions, check out the Editor Samples on codeplex
http://editorsamples.codeplex.com/

I gave a talk on Microsoft Small Basic last night at the Twin Cities Languages User Group. I promised to post my materials and here they are.

The zip contains the powerpoint presentation file, the example programs and the example extension.

For the guy that asked about mp3s. It looks like they will work as long as the computer it’s running on has an mp3 codec installed (which is very unlikely).

Just a quick post here for the people that attended my presentation. Thank you for coming to listen to me blabber about snippets and little tips and tricks. I hope you found it of some use.

1. UIPropertyMetadata needs to be replaced with PropertyMetadata
2. Color.FromScRgb needs to be replaced with Color.FromArgb and it's inputs run through Convert.ToByte
3. MagnifyEffect.cs and SwirlEffect.cs reference classes that do not exist in Silverlight like the Vector class. I could have got them from reflector but in sake of time I didn't (that and being able to release this code)
4. Getting the ps resources required a minor change to the Global static class. Basically changing the path to do a Relative URI lookup.

public class MyBag : DynamicObject
{
// überschreibt Getter / Setter
} 
dynamic b = new MyBag();
b.Id = 124;
b.Name = "Windows 7"
b.Price = 499.99m;
b.IsAvailable = false;

public void InsertCustomer( int customerId,
                          string companyName = "Neue Firma",
                          decimal creditLimit = 2000m )
{
}

InsertCustomer( 1, creditLimit: 2000m );  

InsertCustomer( creditLimit: 2000m, customerId: 1 );

1. Dynamic binding. We've introduced a new type, dynamic, which behaves much like object, but allows the operations performed on your object to be bound at runtime instead of compile time.
2. Named and Optional parameters. You can now specify default values for your parameters, allowing them to be optionally specified at the call site. We've also added the ability for your arguments to be passed by name, so that you can specify exactly which arguments you want to give, and refrain from specifying the rest (assuming they're optional).
3. Com interop features. We've done quite a bit of work to improve COM interop. These include:
• No ref for COM calls. For all COM calls that take ref arguments, you can specify an argument without a ref, and the compiler will generate a local for you and generate a ref to that local as the argument.
• No PIA. We have introduced the ability to deploy your applications which use Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) without referencing the actual PIA at runtime. This allows compiling against them, but not needing to ship them with your application.
• Implicit dynamic for COM types. We now give you the option of turning all objects returned from COM into dynamics so that you can perform late bound calls off of them instead of having to cast the result in order to make it useful.