Developing Real-World Extensions for Visual Studio Editor

In our journey so far, we’ve not extended the core part of Visual Studio that is predominantly used by the developers – the code editor. The Visual Studio editor offers a rich set of extension points, and most of its parts are extensible via the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). In fact, there are so many extensibility points exposed by the editor that covering each of these in details would require a book in itself. Fortunately for us, Microsoft has already documented these extensibility points and features in great depth. In this chapter, we will discuss the extensibility points of the Visual Studio editor and develop extensions for code analysis, fixes, and refactoring.