Deploying Visual Studio Extensions

Among new features in the Visual Studio extensibility, deploying extensions also changes. Microsoft introduces a new file type named VSIX (with .vsix extension) for packaging deploying Visual Studio extensions. This new format is intended as a replacement for the previous .vsi file format first introduced with Visual Studio 2005. Basically a VSIX package is nothing but a zip archive that is built with regard to the open packaging convention. This means that if you rename the .vsix package into .zip, you can browse its content with any compression tool supporting zips. This kind of package needs to store some other files:

• A [Content_Types].xml file that describes the archive content according to the open ...

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