Custom Add-Ins Help You Maximize the Productivity of Visual Studio .NET
Leo A. Notenboom
Originally published in MSDN Magazine, February 2002.

I've received several requests for more information on add-ins, and further resources for customizing Visual Studio .NET. What I have has been collected here.

• The article itself can be found here: Custom Add-Ins Help You Maximize the Productivity of Visual Studio .NET
• There is a growing set of examples on Visual Studio automation on MSDN: Visual Studio .NET automation samples.

Writing Add-Ins for Visual Studio .NET

Developing Visual Studio .NET Macros and Add-Ins

Visual Studio documentation on automation is good, but can take a little effort to wade through. In on-line help, search for "The Spectrum of Visual Studio .NET Automation" and one of the listed results will be a topic by that name. If you have Visual Studio .NET on-line installed this link should bring up the topic directly, or you can copy that link into the help browser within Visual Studio .NET.

There are several Usenet news groups that may be of interest in discussing Visual Studio .NET, the IDE and Automation. As I understand it these are not staffed by Microsoft personnel, but rather are a forum for developers to share ideas, questions and answers.

• microsoft.public.vsnet.ide - perhaps the best place for IDE and Automation related conversations.
• microsoft.public.vstudio.development
• microsoft.public.vstudio.general
• microsoft.public.msdn.magazine - more of a general MSDN magazine discussion though pointers to other resources are occasionally posted here.

These news groups may be available via your ISP's usenet feed, via the news server msnews.microsoft.com, or in a web interface at http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups/.

Of course the newsgroups are just one support option (perhaps one of the more useful). The full set of options is, of course, at http://msdn.microsoft.com/support/.

There are now also a couple of books about writing add-ins for Visual Studio, pictured at right. Note that I'm not endorsing them ... I haven't read them ... but pass on their existence as a potential resource for you.

(The information on this page is not owned by or affiliated with Microsoft in any way, other than the fact that the contents refer to a Microsoft product.