Organizations are increasingly looking for greater control over extensions within development environments. Driven by security, compliance, and internal governance requirements, teams want more visibility into how developers discover and acquire extensions. To address these needs, we're excited to begin previewing Private Marketplace support in ...

Starting in Visual Studio 18.5, you can create and build Visual Studio extensions (VSIX) using an officially supported SDK-style project. This brings VSIX projects into the modern build and deployment pipeline, improving incremental build performance and making the build → deploy → debug workflow more reliable. Install the Visual Studio extension d...

Bookmarks in Visual Studio have always been a simple, reliable feature. Many developers use them regularly, and over the years we’ve heard consistent feedback from those users. Bookmarks were useful, but there were a few core gaps that kept them from being as effective and relevant as they could be. Navigation was one of the biggest pain points....

If you use editor productivity extensions for Visual Studio 2026, there's good news—they can now load faster! Extension developers with existing MEF-based editor productivity extensions should read this blog to learn about recent changes and how they might be affected.  We introduced VisualStudio.Extensibility to simplify the creation of Visual ...

We have great news for extension users and developers: Visual Studio 2026 is introducing an extension compatibility model designed specifically to make your life easier. Our top priority is to ensure that your extensions continue to work seamlessly across Visual Studio releases - with no extra effort required from you. For users: extensions that wo...

The latest updates in Visual Studio 2022 introduced features specifically designed to improve how you manage extensions. These updates offer tools that help you automate processes, provide detailed controls for configuration, and enhance the user interface to streamline your development workflows. Seamless auto updates Visual Studio now automatic...

As Visual Studio extension authors, our goal is to create tools that empower developers across diverse environments. A key part of this mission involves ensuring that your extension commands remain accessible and consistent across all Visual Studio locales. In your VSSDK extensions, by adding the CanonicalName property to your commands in the .vsct...

We continue to invest in the VisualStudio.Extensibility SDK to allow users like you to create extensions that run faster and smoother than ever before! VisualStudio.Extensibility helps you build extensions that run outside the main Visual Studio IDE process for improved performance, reliability, and installation without restarting Visual Studio. Ad...

We continue to invest in the VisualStudio.Extensibility SDK to allow users like you to create extensions that run faster and smoother than ever before! VisualStudio.Extensibility helps you build extensions that run outside the main Visual Studio IDE process for improved performance, reliability, and installation without restarting Visual Studio. Ad...

As Visual Studio transitions its core packages and services to an async loading/retrieval model, we've identified bugs in both the initial async implementation and the existing synchronous package loading mechanism. While most of these bug fixes have been transparent to extenders, one requires attention due to changed constraints. This post high...