Creating the VSIX deployment package

Visual Studio extensions are installed using code packages that are commonly referred to as VSIX files, due to their file extension. Some extensions install user interface (UI) controls or add entirely new functionality to the integrated development environment (IDE), as we will see in later chapters. In this chapter, however, we will show the pieces required to make a deployment package that contains a project template capable of reproducing the custom solution from the prior section, using the Add Project dialog in Visual Studio.

Because creating a multi-project template could be a small book unto itself, a pre-built multi-project template is provided in the sample code. Our focus here will be what it takes to generate the VSIX file that can be broadly distributed to other Visual Studio users. As such, we start at a point after both the Web API and WPF projects are exported as templates. This project export technique was demonstrated in the...