Registering and Unregistering VSPackages

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2015. 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

You use attributes to register a VSPackage, but

Registering a VSPackage

You can use attributes to control the registration of managed VSPackages. All registration information is contained in a .pkgdef file. For more information on file-based registration, see CreatePkgDef Utility.

The following code shows how to use the standard registration attributes to register your VSPackage.

[PackageRegistration(UseManagedResourcesOnly = true)]  
[Guid("0B81D86C-0A85-4f30-9B26-DD2616447F95")]  
public sealed class BasicPackage : Package  
{. . .}  

Unregistering an Extension

If you have been experimenting with a lot of different VSPackages and want to remove them from the experimental instance, you can just run the Reset command. Look for Reset the Visual Studio Experimental Instance on the start page of your computer, or run this command from the command line:

<location of Visual Studio 2015 install>\"Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VSSDK\VisualStudioIntegration\Tools\Bin\CreateExpInstance.exe" /Reset /VSInstance=14.0 /RootSuffix=Exp  

If you want to uninstall an extension that you have installed on your development instance of Visual Studio, go to Tools / Extensions and Updates, find the extension, and click Uninstall.

If for some reason neither of these methods succeeds at uninstalling the extension, you can unregister the VSPackage assembly from the command line as follows:

<location of Visual Studio 2015 install>\"Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VSSDK\VisualStudioIntegration\Tools\Bin\regpkg” /unregister <pathToVSPackage assembly>  

See Also

VSPackages