MZ-Tools Articles Series

MZ-Tools Articles Series: HOWTO: Create two Visual Studio packages in a single assembly

The first MZ-Tools Articles Series that I have written this new year is this:

HOWTO: Create two Visual Studio packages in a single assembly

I did it as a pure exercise after a question in the MSDN VSX forum and I don’t think it has any practical use even for the problem of a package targeting multiple versions of Visual Studio with the maximum reuse of code at source and binary levels.

Currently the most notorious problem that I have found (and that I reported at Uservoice) is that you can’t provide a single .vsix package for VS 2010/2012/2013 with a single binary assembly and two .vsct tables with the following conditions:

  • The package uses one .vsct command table for VS 2010 (with colorful icons)
  • The package uses another .vsct command table for VS 2012/2013 (with gray icons)

So, you can create a single package in a single assembly with two .vsct tables, or two packages in a single assembly with a different .vsct file each one (like in the example provided in the article), but neither you can specify in the .vsct table or package attributes the target VS version, nor you can specify in the manifest of the .vsix file the target VS version of each .pkgdef file.