Visual Studio Integrator Program

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Overview

"One of the worst traps a person can fall into is to become obsessed with his own exceptional moments of inspiration".

--Oswald Chambers

In this chapter I discuss several options that Microsoft has provided in Visual Studio .NET to allow you to expand on the languages that are initially provided with .NET. I also demonstrate how to write add-ins in other languages and how to mix languages in an add-in. Finally, I demonstrate how to alter the operation of an add-in based on the language being used in the IDE's Active Document window.

The .NET programming platform includes three languages at this time: Visual Basic .NET, Visual C#, and Visual C++. Microsoft has intimated that there will be other languages from Microsoft as well as other languages from various vendors that will use the .NET Framework. This is possible because of the set of unified classes provided by .NET Framework. Visual Studio .NET classes provide a consistent method of using the Framework's functionality, regardless of the base language that you choose. Once you learn to use the class library, you no longer need to learn different API calling sequences to write applications.

The programming language you choose depends on your experience and the needs of the application you are writing. In most situations, you can use any or all of the Microsoft programming languages. Each of the Visual Studio .NET programming languages has its strengths. It may well be a matter of preference that determines the language you choose.

In addition to the languages that Microsoft has already released with .NET and those it plans to release in the future, there are other avenues for introducing more languages and tools into .NET. Several of these avenues are discussed in the following sections.

Note 

Microsoft has partnered with a number of companies to bring additional languages to the .NET platform. Some of the languages Microsoft documents in MSDN are COBOL, Pascal, Perl, Fortran, Smalltalk, and Eiffel, just to name a few. To find out more about these languages and others, you should contact the vendor for the specific language in which you are interested.

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