[MonoDevelop] MonoDevelop's extensibility API

[Filipe Correia]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 7:19 PM, Michael Hutchinson
<m.j.hutchinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Given that Visual Studio is extensible, and so is MonoDevelop, I'm
>> wondering if there are any plans of making MonoDevelop follow a
>> similar API to the one exposed by the Visual Studio Shell[1]. This
>> could allow some interesting things like, for instance, running the
>> IronPythonStudio[2] on linux, on top of monodevelop :)
>
> There are no plans to do so. MonoDevelop and VS' extensions points are
> fundamentally quite different -- in fact, as MD was originally a fork
> of SharpDevelop, compatibility with SD addins would be much easier.
> There are many extension points, and each one would present unique
> difficulties. Also, VS uses COM, but MD is pure managed code.

And I'd say, using managed code is a big plus to MD :)
However, I haven't yet tried VSShell[1], but I believe one can use it
to extend VS using C# too.

> I suspect that substantially less effort would be required to port
> most of the addins to MD directly. Anyway, the hard part of language
> bindings is the parser, and re-using that in MD would likely not
> present a problem.

At least, I think we could have some advantages from trying to
approach the two APIs whenever possible. It would be really nice being
able to develop extensions targeting both MD and VS, even if some
(reasonable number of) ifdefs are required

--
Filipe Correia

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb510103.aspx