How to: Migrate VSPackages to Visual Studio 2013

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You can migrate VSPackages from Visual Studio 2012 to Visual Studio 2013.

To migrate a basic VSPackage solution

  1. Install Visual Studio 2013 and the Visual Studio 2013 SDK.

    You can install the Visual Studio 2013 SDK at Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Center. For more information, see Extending Visual Studio Overview.

  2. Open the project in Visual Studio. On the menu bar, choose File, Open, Project.

  3. A message box notifies you that the changes made to the project will make it impossible to open it in a previous version. Choose the OK button.

  4. After the upgrade completes, on the menu bar, choose Project, Properties, Debug, and change the path of devenv.exe to the Visual Studio 2013 path, which resembles %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.

  5. Add a reference to Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.12.0.dll. (In Solution Explorer, open the shortcut menu for the References node and then choose Add Reference. In Reference Manager, select the Extensions tab and then select Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.12.0.)

  6. Build the solution. The built files are deployed to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio.12.0Exp\Extensions\<Author Name>\<Project Name>\<Project Version>\.

  7. Start debugging. A second instance of Visual Studio appears.

    For information about how to run VSPackages in the experimental instance, see Experimental Instance of Visual Studio.