ShareCamp.at: Extending Visual Studio SharePoint Tools

Peter Holpar showed us how to extend the Visual Studio Tools for SharePoint.

Implementation

The creation of a Visual Studio Extension is basically a custom class that implements some interfaces. The biggest problem is that the documentation is not that good – Peter told us that it needs a lot of debugging to get things working.

PreReqs

Get the Visual Studio 2012/2013 SDK and you need, of course, an installed SharePoint because of the assemblies.

Use Cases

1. Providing Templates for SharePoint Items (Project Templates, Feature Templates – you name it)
2. Creating custom deployment steps

Key takeaway

Okay, this is a lot of work – you need a very good reason to develop a custom extension. Looking at the awesome CKSDEV extension – I really value this extension more now.