I'd like to create an add-on for Visual Studio 2008, but am finding more examples and sample code for VS2010 SDK. Is it possible to build an add-on with VS2010 SDK and target VS2008? If not, are there any good sites for VS2008 add-on dev? Google searches seem to all lead to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/, which is focused on VS2010.
A:
Yes it is certainly possible to use a newer version of Visual Studio to build an older extension. I don't know if any specific down targetted templates exist but you could simply create the initial extension project in Visual Studio 2008 and then open it in Visual Studio 2010.
However you cannot in general use the VS2010 SDK binaries to build a pre 2010 extension (in particular the managed ones). Many APIs of the APIs are different and not compatible between versions of Visual Studio. It would be best to use the binaries from the targetted SDK.
True you can use the new binaries in very specific circumstances (COM interface assembles for example in a C++ project). But this requires a lot of discipline to get correct.
JaredPar
2010-08-05 15:45:23