DXCore - Free library for creating plugins in Visual Studio

In this article we want to make a brief overview of DXCore and tell you how this .NET library can be useful.

DXCore is an absolutely free product that we have been developing and supporting since 2004. In a nutshell, DXCore makes it easy to develop extensions for Visual Studio.
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We try to design the API of this library so as to simplify the process of creating plug-ins as much as possible - so that developers can focus on the functionality and, if possible, avoid the main difficulties of integrating with Visual Studio.

DXCore is designed for those who lack something in Visual Studio and who need to expand their development environment. We can say that not everyone has such a desire, and that in Visual Studio everything is already there and there is nothing to add something to it. And this may be true.

However, those developers who do not like to do monotonous and routine things always have a completely understandable desire to optimize their work by automating such routine things.

For DXCore, there are about 50 free open source plugins . For example, there is a replacement for the standard Visual Studio dialog for adding links to assemblies. The standard dialog is somewhat slow, even though in Visual Studio 2010 the loading of available assemblies is done in a separate thread.

On the basis of DXCore developed CodeRushXpress - another free product of the company DevExpress. CodeRushXpress includes about 50 refactorings and functionality for navigating and creating declarations in code.

So, the main services DXCore:

• Integration with Visual Studio
  
  
  
  The library has a system of extensions (plug-ins) built on the component principle. Several basic types of plugins are supported: standard plugin, plugin for creating ToolWindow, plugin for creating options page.
  
  
• Display graphic information in a text editor
  
  
  
  Implemented services and event system to simplify the process of displaying graphical information in the text editor window of Visual Studio. There are a number of ready-made graphic elements.
  
  
• Parsing, converting and generating code
  
  
  
  The following languages ​​are supported: C #, Visual Basic, C ++, JavaScript. DXCore also contains services for working with CSS, HTML, XML, XAML.
  
  
• Work with projects and files
  
  
  
  DXCore provides its API for working with projects and files in Visual Studio.
  
  
• Code analysis
  
  
  
  There are services for searching references and declarations in the code, defining and deducing (type inference) data types of expressions, loading and analyzing metadata of .NET assemblies.
  

If you are interested, here is the link where you can download the DXCore library.

In future articles we would like to consider in more detail each of these areas. And what do you want to see first?