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In order to produce a plug in and incorporate it (merge) easily with Visual Studio 2010.

I was wondering which language was used by Microsoft to create it?

In order to offer our product to Microsoft, we must know which language is better to integrate with Visual Studio.

Was it pure C++? A friend of mine told me it was written in C#.

gnat
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Junior Mayhe
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2 Answers2

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It was written using WPF, so that would be XAML and (most likely) C#.

Wikipedia just states:

The IDE shell has been rewritten using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), whereas the internals have been redesigned using Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

which doesn't help with the non XAML part.

I suspect that there will be C++ elements in there too.

Expression Blend uses WPF too.

Interestingly I've not been able to find any more information on this other than "it was written in WPF".

ChrisF
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Much of the interface of Visual Studio 2010 was written using WPF (C# and XAML), but they had so much good working code already built in C++ (I think I remember hearing that a good portion of Intellisense is still in C++, but I may be wrong) that they kept and built on top of. Check out Snoop to take a peek at the internals of the interface.

You can learn more about the development of VS2010 by watching this video: http://www.microsoftpdc.com/2009/CL09

In regards to developing an extension for Visual Studio, assuming that's what you are doing, I would recommend C#.

awmckinley
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