VS Plugin Development
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007Way back in late 2004, I was really getting my C# game going and had finally gotten the new worn off of the Visual Studio environment and I noticed some gaps in what I wanted and what it could do. I looked around and found Resharper 1.0 and CodeSmart and was in heaven. The project that I was on bought copies for us and we flew like the wind! They did the few things that I wasn’t willing to live without and introduced me to a new level of coding productivity. My code got more consistent and everything was good. Then the project ended (I was contracting at the time) and I had to leave my pretty new tools behind. When I moved, I moved to a new project working for a startup and eventually became an employee rather than just a contractor. If I wanted to keep my tools, I would have to pony up the $ for them myself. I spent one weekend looking at what it would take for me to build an add-in for VS that would do the 2-3 things that I could not live without (automatically adding using statements, method extraction, and automatic properties from member variables) and found the extensibility model confusing and feature poor. I bought Resharper that next Monday and didn’t begrudge the amount they charged for it. However, the idea of writing a plugin for VS was firmly planted in my brain. I have followed the growth of the plugin market and the increased ease of use of the Extensibility model with great interest, and this blog entry:
http://blogs.msdn.com/noahc/archive/2007/10/16/hang-n-at-the-vsip-conference.aspx
that covers the VSIP Conference that is going on right now re-enthused me. It has some good information about how TestDriven.Net can make your cross platform testing easier and gives great links to add-in resources.