Visual Studio Extensibility - Visual Studio As An Extensible Platform

Visual Studio As An Extensible Platform

When running the Visual Studio IDE the devenv.exe file is started. However, the IDE is not just a simple monolithic .exe file or an executable divided into a few .dll files. It is a shell that provides a graphical environment to host functional units, called packages. What is perceived by users of Visual Studio is a cooperation of the shell and hosted packages. The core functions of the IDE are also implemented in packages including the C# or VB project types, testing features and many more. Majority of third-party extensions loaded into Visual Studio are also implemented in packages. After installing Visual Studio, about a hundred packages are installed with the shell, depending on the version of VS.

Read more about this topic:  Visual Studio Extensibility

Famous quotes containing the words visual, studio and/or platform:

    “The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
    —Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    “[T]hose wholemeal breads ... look hand-thrown, like studio pottery, and are fine if you have all your teeth. But if not, then not. Perhaps the rise ... of the ... factory-made loaf, which may easily be mumbled to a pap betweeen gums, reflects the sorry state of the nation’s dental health.”
    —Angela Carter (1940–1992)

    “I have rather a strange objection to talking from the back platform of a train.... It changes too often. It moves around and shifts its ground too often. I like a platform that stays put.”
    —Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)