Legacy Language Service Extensibility
Applies to: 
Visual Studio 
Visual Studio for Mac
Note
This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here
A language service provides language-specific support for editing source code in the IDE.
Legacy language services are implemented as part of a VSPackage, but the newer way to implement language service features is to use MEF extensions. To find out more about the new way to implement a language service, see Editor and Language Service Extensions.
This section discusses the structure and implementation of a legacy language service.
In This Section
Explains how to update a language service from Visual Studio 2008 to the latest version.
Provides important information about how to develop language services to integrate a programming language into Visual Studio.
Provides links to topics that can help you create a language service.
Provides information about supporting syntax highlighting in a language service.
Provides information about how to use the managed package framework (MPF) to implement a full-featured language service in managed code.
Describes libraries and tools that enable you to browse tree views of symbols in the IDE.
Related Sections
Provides an overview of Visual Studio editors.
Provides information about and a link to the Visual Studio Debugging SDK, which contains the information that is required to create and customize debugger components used to debug programs.