Add-ins for Visual Studio have become so irrelevant for Microsoft that apparently they don’t even deserve a post in the Visual Studio blog to announce that they are officially deprecated in Visual Studio 2013. So I only became aware through this thread in the MSDN VSX forum that points to this MSDN documentation:

Automation and Extensibility for Visual Studio
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xc52cke4.aspx

that states:

“Visual Studio add-ins are deprecated in Visual Studio 2013. You should upgrade your add-ins to VSPackage extensions.”

That means that at some point the Add-In Manager will be removed from Visual Studio. This was expected as I posted here and I have already planned to move my MZ-Tools add-in to a package as I announced here, along with a new series of articles about creating packages (next year) once I learn the stuff more deeply.

I have updated the page Resources about Visual Studio .NET extensibility to include the download links to:

• Visual Studio 2013 SDK
• Visual Studio 2013 Isolated Shell
• Visual Studio 2013 Integrated Shell

and to include the link to the Visual Studio 2013 SDK MSDN documentation.

Remember that the VS 2013 SDK is now required to get the template for add-ins, as I explained here.