52.7. Deployment
Deployment of a Visual Studio add-in was harder before Visual Studio 2005, but thanks to the simplification of the deployment process in this version and the introduction of .AddIn files, deployment has been made much simpler.
To deploy an add-in you need to copy two files for the add-in to specified paths. One file is the assembly DLL file for an add-in and the second file is its .AddIn file. When you deploy both of these files in a specified path and load the Visual Studio IDE, the add-in is actually deployed and you can start using it.
To deploy an add-in for the current user of a machine, you need to deploy these files to the Add-ins folder in the Visual Studio folder installation path, in the personal documents folder. The personal documents folder is My Documents in Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, and Documents in Windows Vista.
You can automate this deployment by using a setup project that copies these two files to the specified folder on the end user's machine, or you can use the Visual Studio Content Installer, which is simpler and automatically deploys add-in files to specified paths. The Visual Studio Content Installer is a great option to deploy some common extensions for Visual Studio just by adding them to a single package and adding an XML configuration file for the installer.
After deploying your add-ins, they should appear in the Add-in Manager dialog available in the Tools menu in the Visual Studio IDE (Figure 52-14).
Figure 52.14. Figure 52-14 ...
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