Fundamentals Overview

This section covers the fundamental concepts you need to understand when building Visual Studio extensions.

What You’ll Learn

• Service Provider Pattern - How to access VS services
• AsyncPackage - Modern package implementation
• Commands - Adding menu items and keyboard shortcuts
• Tool Windows - Creating dockable windows
• Editors - Extending the text editor
• Options Pages - Adding settings UI

Prerequisites

Before diving into these topics, make sure you’ve completed the Getting Started section and have a working extension project.

Core Architecture

Visual Studio extensions are built on several key architectural patterns:

COM and Managed Code

Visual Studio’s core is COM-based, but the VS SDK provides managed wrappers. Understanding when you’re crossing this boundary helps explain some API patterns.

MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework)

Many editor features use MEF for discovery and composition. Components export interfaces that VS imports automatically.

Services

VS provides functionality through services - singleton objects accessed via the service provider pattern. This decouples components and enables extensibility.

Next Steps

Start with Service Provider to understand how to access Visual Studio’s functionality from your extension.