Does Visual Studio 2010 have backward compatibility with visual studio 2008's addins ?

Question

I have some really great addins in Visual Studio 2008 that I don't want to lose, but I've heard that Visual Studio 2010 will use MEF. Does it mean that I can say goodbye to my dancing banana ?

Answer 1

I don't think any final word has been said on this, but based on the fact that VS2010 seems to be a major rewrite (all the code editor stuff is WPF-based), the fact that MEF is being introduced as its extensibility model, and based on experience with earlier VS upgrades, I would highly doubt that all your plugins will just keep working..... some might - but a lot of them will require an upgrade, I'm afraid.

Marc

Answer 2

Unless the direction has changed from the first CTP released last year, the old method of plugging in still works. We should have a new beta soon (I am not sure when soon is, but it has been five months since the last one).

MEF and using WPF as the front end does not mean the old way of plugging in tools will no longer work.

Answer 3

They didn't rewrite everything in VS. Only the UI (moved to WPF).

Current plugins CAN load, but they have to know about the new registry keys. We are testing this right now for our database engine. There are some new interfaces and ways to get into the little UI for Visual Studio Extensions (think iPhone store type concept). But they are not required right now (Jun 2009).

That could change of course, but I think it is in MS's best interest to make sure as many older plugins as possible load and run.

Answer 4

There are three levels of extensibility in Visual Studio :

1. Macros
2. Add-ins
3. VS Packages

I can confirm that VS2008 Add-ins work perfectly well in VS2010 beta2. You just have to edit the .AddIn file and replace "9.0" by "10.0". Yes, that's all !

I don't know about VS Packages though.