Hi there,
We have a customer whose strict requirement is to enable building VS plug-ins on a build environment where installing Visual Studio is not an option. So far I gather that we could create our own homegrown tools for generating the VSIX manifest and the PkgDef file (especially given the limited number of options that we need to support for the task at hand). Assembling the VSIX bundle itself does not seem to be a problem either, as it is basically a .zip file with a special file Content_Types.xml added to the archive contents.
However the Visual Studio Command Table compiler still looks like a challenge, since it's not something that can be easily replicated without reverse engineering (and that would be obviously illegal). And neither can we use the original vsct.exe since it is not "whilelisted" in the BUILDSERVER.TXT list.
We could of course resort to compiling the command tables once and then storing the compiled version in the source control system (assuming the command tables do not change often, and the involved manual burden is acceptable), but perhaps there is some option to use vsct.exe on a build server that does not violate the Visual Studio EULA?