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Comment by Yarnage | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this article greatly confused me as to what the author was upset about. Was it the Visual Studio extensibility? .Net? Visual Studio itself?

From the context of the article I'm pretty sure the author is upset at the Visual Studio extensibility (and rightfully so) but I'm still confused when he made statements about it driving .Net developers away; I'd imagine less than a quarter of .Net developers actually even THINK about extending any VS functions.

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Obviously I failed at conveying my point. Greatly sorry about that.

I think it's mad that in 2012, it's so hard to extend Visual Studio using C# and .net.

I'm not saying it drives .net developers away. I'm saying it hurts the .net platform as a whole.

Would VS's extensibility be easier, with better APIs and documentations, we would see a lot more third party plugins to improve our programming experience with VS.

I worked for Microsoft on Visual Studio extensibility back in the early days of .NET. At the time it was ground breaking and exciting that there was finally one IDE for using all of Microsoft's programming languages with no hidden APIs. The IDE is now long overdue for a rewrite in .NET, but it would be such a massive undertaking. So far the business benefit of that has yet to eclipse the cost.

Note that I'm not asking for VS to be rewritten. I actually don't think it would make a lot of sense.

I'm simply asking for good bindings, well documented and respecting the expectations (API wise) of a managed programmer.

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