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What is Visual Studio extensibility?

Visual Studio is designed to be extended. You can add commands, tool windows, editor features, language support, debugger visualizers, and much more — customizing the IDE to fit your workflow or sharing your tools with the community.

How extensions work

Extensions are packaged as VSIX files and installed into Visual Studio. They integrate with the IDE through well-defined APIs that let you:

  • Add commands to menus, toolbars, and context menus
  • Create tool windows with custom UI for specialized workflows
  • Extend the editor with margins, CodeLens, taggers, and syntax highlighting
  • Provide language support via the Language Server Protocol (LSP)
  • Add debugger visualizers for complex data types
  • Integrate with the project system to query and modify solutions
  • Display prompts and dialogs for user interaction
  • Write to the output window and status bar for notifications

The VisualStudio.Extensibility SDK

The VisualStudio.Extensibility SDK is the recommended way to build extensions. It runs your extension in a separate process from Visual Studio, which means:

Benefit What it means
Reliability Out-of-process hosting reduces the risk of extension failures bringing down Visual Studio
Performance Heavy work runs outside the IDE process, helping preserve responsiveness
Simplicity Modern .NET APIs with dependency injection
Hot-loading Install and load your extension without restarting VS

Extensions built with this SDK target modern .NET and use familiar patterns like async/await and dependency injection.

When you need more

Some advanced editor features (IntelliSense, light bulb actions, custom editors) aren't yet available out of process. For these, you can build hybrid extensions that combine VisualStudio.Extensibility with traditional in-process VSSDK components. See In-process (hybrid) extensions for details.

Experimental APIs and breaking changes

Most APIs in the VisualStudio.Extensibility SDK are stable starting with the 17.9 release. A few newer APIs are explicitly labeled with the [Experimental] attribute while they mature based on user feedback.

For more information, including how to use experimental APIs, see the Experimental APIs ↗ documentation. Breaking changes are communicated in advance on the breaking changes ↗ page.

API reference

Next steps

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