Creating extensions

So, what do you do when you want an extension but you can't find one in the marketplace that does what you want? Or, what if you find one but it doesn't do exactly what you want? It's simple—we're DEVELOPERS! We can just write our own.

Creating extensions in Visual Studio 2019 for Windows

To develop extensions in Windows, we need the Visual Studio SDK (VSSDK). This can be installed using the Visual Studio extension development workload in the Visual Studio Installer, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 11.5 – VSSDK installation

There are a number of things we can extend in Visual Studio, including menus and commands, tool windows, languages and editors, projects, Visual Studio itself, and many other things. The VSSDK provides templates for menu commands, tool windows, editor extensions, basic VSPackages, and Visual Studio Extension (VSIX) projects.

Let's create a simple menu command...