I am very seriously considering recommending that the next generation of the product I am working on be migrated from a (shaky) standalone Windows forms application to a VSPackage. However - if I end up going this way - it will mean implementing a fully fledged VSPackage with all the bells and whistles. Including several new project types, numerous editors, source control integration, several steps (validation, generation) to integrate in MSBuild, support for Refactoring, background- validation (squigglies) etc etc. It will be a major undertaking.
Searching for documentation, resources, books - anything - I am still not finding a good starting point to start educating myself in the Visual Studio Extensibility. What I have so far is this:
- MZTools (http://www.mztools.com) is frequently advocated in this forum by its author Carlos Qiuntero.
- Wrox: Profesional Visual Studio Extensibility by Keyvan Nayyeri
- MSDN contains some documentation
- There was also a Microsoft Press book related to Visual Studio .NET but I lost the link. Anyway this seems too outdated
Concerning 1: When I go to the site I can't find the related documentation. Maybe it has been removed?
Concerning 2: The book relates to VS2008 and in the beginning the author laments the fact that many interfaces are unclear and suffer from the COM roots of Visual Studio. But at the same time points out, that Microsoft at the time of writing (2007) is in the process of improving on this. So maybe reading about Visual Studio Extensibility related to VS2008 is wasting effort?
Concerning 3:; This is rather high-level and very brief
Apart from 3 (which is too superficial) everything I find tends to very outdated. Can anyone point me to some up-to-date comprehensive books / documentation / webcasts etc on this.
Do Microsoft offer any paid education, I can come to Redmond if that improves the chances?