Recommendation to enable an .MSI extension not installed in the Common7 folder

Hi,

I have an extension installed by an .MSI. It works fine. It doesn't install in the Visual Studio sub folders, but in its own \program files ... folder. I need to have MEF enabled for this extension (for the NavigateTo feature), that's why I need the Extension Manager to see it as enabled.

I can successfully configure the

%localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Extensions

and

%localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions

for VS 2012 and 2010 respectively with a extension.vsixmanifest file, so the extension is shown in the extension manager. However, the UI is all grayed out and the end-user cannot even enable the extension manually (BTW why? since the extension already runs fine anyway).

So, what I am supposed to do at install time to enable the extension? My setup is WIX-based.

Bonus question: VS 2012 seems to rely on its cache in %localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Extensions. If I delete the extensions.en-US.cache and extensionSdks.en-US.cache and restart DevEnv, it works, but there should also be an official way? Again, what to do in the setup? (VS 2010 doesn't have this problem).

Simon Mourier