Will Visual Studio 2010 still be able to use all the plugins for Visual Studio 2008?

Question

I use Visual Studio 2k8 Pro Edition at home and I have loaded it with a lot of important addins customised for my development.

If I get VS2010 Pro Edition, would all of these plugins fail to work? Is this a plugin-related matter or down to Visual Studio itself? E.g. Visual Studio 2010 may just be based on the 2008 version but with enhancements (is it?).

Thanks

Answer 1

Impossible to say without seeing it in practice. Seriously. We don't know which plug-ins you're using so we've no idea how they're going to react to a new VS version...

But even you had told us, you'd save yourself a lot of time just installing VS 2010 in a VM and trying your plug-ins out.

Answer 2

Nope at least Resharper 4.5 is not working in VS2010

Answer 3

You can always download the beta and try them out.

Answer 4

No. Unmanaged addins are COM objects that are tied to the version of the IDE environment. For the most part, the addins just need to be rebuilt with only minor changes though.

EDIT: Addins that go beyond using the standard addin interfaces though will probably require retooling for the VS2010 environment.

EDIT 2: Managed addins are typically deployed using .addin files which are sometimes located in "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\Addins". The .addin file is an xml file that can be edited by hand. You can try adding a new HostApplication element to the file for a particular managed addin - and specify version 10.0.

Answer 5

Here is the info on the resharper compatibility:

http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2009/05/preview-of-resharper-for-visual-studio-2010-coming-soon/

(Basically they will have a preview release in June)