Deploying and sharing your extensions

Deploying and sharing Visual Studio extensions with the community is an exciting step in the extension development process. It allows us to contribute to the ecosystem, potentially improving the development experience for thousands of Visual Studio users worldwide. In this section, we will walk through a comprehensive guide on deploying and sharing our extensions, including signing your VSIX (a .vsix file contains one or more Visual Studio extensions) packages for added security and trustworthiness.

Once we ensure it is thoroughly tested and ready for public release, we can start the deploying phase. This includes testing across different versions of Visual Studio, handling edge cases, and ensuring compatibility with various project types and configurations.

First, in order to prevent tampering and build trust with the end user, we sign our VSIX with Sign CLI. You need to purchase a code signing certificate from a trusted certificate authority...