Visual Studio 2010 has brought the concept of extensions, a brand new set of tools to extend and adapt the software to the needs of each developer. This is great for Visual Studio users, for having a shiny new Gallery with lots of extensions, but also for addin developers as it makes the development process much easier.
But how about Guidance Automation (the way to go in extending Visual Studio 2005 and 2008)? To have all those guidance packages out there Microsoft released Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit 2010, that allows to building and deploying existing projects as a VSIX package in Visual Studio 2010. But putting an existing guidance package to work in Visual Studio 2010 isn’t a seamless process and requires to migrate it manually, described thoroughly in this guide:
How to Update a Visual Studio 2008 Guidance Package to Visual Studio 2010
Although it’s aimed for Visual Studio 2008 guidance packages it also works for 2005, even if not out of the box. The main glitch is in step 4d while running the UpdateGuidancePackageToVSIX recipe: it won’t update the Version and PublicKeyToken of .vstemplate files because it expects a different version of the Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.VisualStudio assembly, we must edit the WizardExtension element in all .vstemplate files manually (or replace in all files using a an editor like Notepad++) so in the end it each of them looks like this:
<WizardExtension>
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<Assembly>
Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.VisualStudio, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35
</Assembly>
<FullClassName>
Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.VisualStudio.Templates.UnfoldTemplate
</FullClassName>
</WizardExtension>
Along the process some other issues might happen that could make the migrate more complicated:
- The classes of namespace Microsoft.Practices.WizardFramework.Configuration exist in two assemblies (Microsoft.Practices.WizardFramework and Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.VisualStudio) and if any of these classes is used we’ll have to use an extern alias to resolve the ambiguity,
- If “The “GenerateMenuResource” task failed unexpectedly (…)” happens double check that the properties of each .vstemplate file are set to Build Action=Content , Copy To Output Directory=Copy if newer, Include in VSIX=True and also that there aren’t any .vstemplate files not included in the project (either include or delete them).
