Vsi Builder 2010 (for those things you can’t use Visx’s for… snippets, old style VS addins, etc)

Alessandro Del Sole's Blog - Announcing Vsi Builder 2010, a new extension for Visual Studio 2010

“I just released on CodePlex [GD: Click through for the link] and on the Visual Studio Gallery [GD: Click through for the link] a new extension for Visual Studio 2010 named Vsi Builder 2010, due to a good feedback coming from a previous, stand-alone version for VS 2008.

What is it about?

The new extensibility model in Visual Studio 2010 introduced the new VSIX file format and the concept of "extension" in order to share and install components for Visual Studio 2010, such as tool windows, packages and code editor extensions.

The problem is that reusable code-snippets (.snippet files) and old-style add-ins cannot be packaged and deployed via the VSIX format. In fact, they still need to be packaged to .Vsi installers, like it was back in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.

Vsi Builder 2010 helps you build redistributable .Vsi installers for your code snippets and add-ins the quickest way, by adding an easy-to-use tool window to Visual Studio 2010.

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Currently Vsi Builder 2010 can:

• create .Vsi packages with multiple contents of type code snippet and Visual Studio add-ins
• add EULAs to packages
• sign .Vsi packages with digital .Pfx certificates
• uninstall code snippets and add-ins via a graphical tool
• save to and load from disk the list of items you want to package (new in this version)

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Visual Studio Gallery - Vsi Builder 2010

“Vsi Builder 2010 is an extension for Visual Studio 2010 which allows packaging code snippets and add-ins into the old-style .Vsi packages, since they cannot be deployed via the new VSIX format.

The full source code in Visual Basic 2010 is available on CodePlex:[GD:Click through for the link]

(Portions of the extension use the DotNetZip library)

You simply add a list of additional contents, like snippets and add-ins, and then you build your redistributable .Vsi installer. With Vsi Builder you can…

…

…”

The new VS2010 Extensibility model is the one to beat in my mind (i.e. visx’s, the Extension Manager, etc), but there’s still some things that you can’t visx, like code snippets, etc. That’s where this extension comes in (extension to build extensions… ;)

Plus I love it when authors release their source (and they get extra points when it’s in VB. lol )