Why we cannot support Visual Studio Express

We have been asked to support the Express editions of Visual Studio. We have tried but failed. Here is why.

The dot42 Visual Studio Extension

The dot42 Visual Studio Professional (both 2010 and 2012) integration consists project templates, item templates and a Visual Studio package (VSPackage).

The templates are used to start a new project and add different types of dot42 items such as resources. The Visual Studio package makes dot42 actually do something in Visual Studio. This includes the dot42 project type, the debugger extension, additional property property pages, project item settings, and so on. For example, the debugger extensions is an implementation of a large set of COM interfaces (IDebugEngine2 and many more) that control what happens when you press F5.

So what about Visual C# Express?

As it turns out, Visual C# Express and all other Express editions are not extensible as required by dot42. The Express editions can only be extended by means of templates. You cannot control the compiler or the debugger.

Hopefully, further extensibility will be allowed by future releases of the Express editions. Until then, we can only support the Professional editions.