

There is no need to use the web browser for searching or to run the setup program. It brings the Visual Studio Gallery into Visual Studio IDE (figure 1).

Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager is integrated with the Visual Studio Gallery. You can also read the comments and provide your feedback and ratings to the extensions. You can browse and subscribe to RSS feeds of the extensions. The web site is the official and centralized resource for Visual Studio extensions. That has changed with the Visual Studio Gallery. Developers could search the Internet for extensions, or they could get extension information from magazine articles forum posts or blogs.It was difficult to discover all the available options and was hard to compare similar extensions. In the past, finding the right extensions for Visual Studio involved a lot of research.


Add-ins, Visual Studios primary extensibility option, was implemented via COM interfaces. While some are mere novelties, those for development tools like Eclipse and Visual Studio offer developers significant productivity boosts.Įarlier versions of Visual Studio were built on top of COM technology. They are popular in many applications, including modern web browsers Internet Explorer and Firefox, Microsoft Office, Media Players, Photoshop, Eclipse, Visual Studio and etc. Extensions provide additional functions or customization for a core application.
