51.5. Limitations of the Automation Model
Although the automation model tries to cover everything in the Visual Studio IDE, and is very powerful in this way, there still may be some areas that remain uncovered.
You use the automation model and DTE in order to write programming code to automate something or to extend the Visual Studio IDE. But there are some limitations if you try to get access to the underlying layers of the Visual Studio ecosystem.
The automation model is suitable for common tasks and normal integration scenarios as well as many automation processes, but it's not suitable for deeper integrations and adding some major features to the Visual Studio environment.
The solution is to use underlying APIs via VSPackages to extend Visual Studio. The topic of Visual Studio Shell and VSPackages is broad and can't be covered here. Even though the automation model has been the most common way to extend and automate the IDE, it's not the only way, and there is something more powerful behind the scenes — Visual Studio Shell API and VSPackage as the deepest extensibility options in Visual Studio.
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