Visual Studio Project System

Following on from the previous post on Visual Studio extensibility (VSX), I'd like to point out an extremely useful resource for anyone looking at extending Visual Studio's project system. The IronPython project is hosted on CodePlex with all of it's source code for you to look at. From the perspective of Visual Studio, this shows you how to create a complete project system! So you can see implementations of new project and item templates with parameter substitution along with wizards. It also includes things like intellisense and a custom build environment for the IronPython language. A lot of this is achieved using another Codeplex project - the Managed Package Framework for Projects (MPFProj) - which gives you a framework for building a custom project environment in Visual Studio. At the moment MPFProj is not included as part of the Visual Studio SDK, and you need to include all the MPFProj source in your own project - but keep an eye on this project here (VSXtra) for a DLL containing a pre-compiled version of the MPFProj code.