I’m sitting through the two-day Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Developers Conference this week and Rico Mariani gave his roadmap to Visual Studio extensibility. Here are some highlights of the coming, “decade worth of work” …
VS10 (the version after 2008, a.k.a. “Dev10”)
- New editor with fine-grained extensibility
- Build on Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF) which is “COM for the managed world”
- All new features that should support multiple languages do
VS11
- VSTA (DLR) used for macros and other end-user extensibility
- Critical mass for managed extensibility models enables several common classes of add-ins to be built purely in managed code
- Common project system
- Richer, common base types and protocols for discovery, activation, and manipulation
- Asynchronous extension and visualization model and showcase examples
VS12
- Stable VSIP API’s enabling a high degree of compatibility
- Extensive use of asynchronous extension and visualization model
