Anatomy of an extension

a visual studio extension project is a normal c-sharp project but with a few things that make it unique so let's go through and highlight some of those to get a better understanding of what makes a visual studio extension we'll start by creating a new v6 project by searching for the v6 community templates and we'll select the one with a command this is one of the more commonly used templates we'll also give it a name let's call it my demo the c sharp project is created and we can see we have a bunch of nuget packages already referenced it also contains a command class an extension icon and a v6 manifest this is where we keep metadata about our extension such as a name make sure to specify a descriptive name here we also need to specify a unique product id it can be any string and make sure to give your extension a good description you can specify a license as many comma separated tags as you want and a url to your github repository next we'll look at the visual studio command table file it's an xml file that lets us define commands menus groups key bindings and other things about our extension a group can contain multiple menus and commands and a button here is just a different word for command i can also set my key bindings to automatically trigger one of these buttons the package class is the entry point for most extensions here we can register services tool windows and in our case commands this will automatically find all commands and register them with visual studio and if we look at our command we can see it's a very simple class that handles the command click the same command that we defined in our xml command table file i'll build the project like any other.net project and that will produce the output in the bin directory the output of an extension project is a file called a v6 file and that is my extension i can simply double click the v6 file to start the visual studio extension installer this is the extension file that i want to publish to the visual studio marketplace or share with my colleagues if you're curious to see what's inside a v6 file simply rename it to sip and open it in the file explorer and that will show you everything inside the v6 container file so now that you know what makes an extension project an extension project you're now ready to build your first extension you