VSIX and component vendors

Question

I'm part of a company called Actipro Software who make WPF and WinForms control products.  I've been reading a bit about VSIX, and it seems like it's geared mostly for vendors who are extending the VS shell.  However is there anything that component developers such as us should be doing to use it as well?

We currently have an MSI that installs our control assemblies and documentation to the Program Files folder, sample projects and .exe's to the user's documents folder, controls into the VS toolbox, and registers VS item templates.  The MSI also creates Windows Programs menu entries that link to our sample projects, documentation, etc.

Any help is appreciated as to whether we should continue just doing what we are doing or if we should be changing things.  Also consider that we must continue to support VS 2008 for a while and can't completely switch to VS 2010.  Thanks in advance.

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actiprosoftware.com - WPF syntaxeditor, ribbon, docking/mdi, propertygrid, editors, navbar, explorerbar, breadcrumb, gauge, bar code, wizard controls & much mored

Answer 1

Hi Bill,

I would recommend not changing anything at this point for your installer, especially since you need to support multiple VS versions.

Take a look at this blog post for best practices to still show up in the VSIX/Extension Manager model but ship as an MSI:

http://blogs.msdn.com/visualstudio/archive/2009/10/27/vsix-and-msi.aspx