Daniel Cazzulino's Blog

From Clarius VisualStudio Targets project:

Activity tracing is part of a feature that was initially introduced with WCF, named End-to-End Tracing. Its underlying implementation, however, is baked into the XmlWriterTraceListener and does not depend on WCF in any way. Currently it's only supported in the SystemDiagnostics implementation.

The MS recommended way is to just use the Microsoft.TextTemplating.targets which come with the Visual Studio Visualization and Modeling SDK. It makes me slightly nervous that it requires a little known SDK that is hosted on http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vsvmsdk rather than something more “official” like the MSDN Download Center, where the proper VS SDK lives. It also turns out to be absolutely unnecessary, since all you need is already installed with your base Visual Studio setup.

For most common project types, you can just create a project in VS2010 and open it in 2012 and 2013 just fine. For some others (like VS package or VSIX projects), you may find Visual Studio wants to perform a one-way conversion:

A World of Pain?

It's not quite uncommon to see developers despair when doing Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) work. In addition to a myriad new APIs to learn (which can be pretty intimidating), it seems up-front so alien to the typical development work you do: you have to plug into someone else's environment, you have to learn when and why your code will be invoked, but worst of all, there's no plug-in architecture per-se.

The original story around VSIX deployment via an MSI was that simply copying it to the %VSInstallDir%\Common7\Ide\Extensions\Your Company\Your Product\Version was enough. But alas, devil is in the details, and a fairly complex matrix of supported and unsupported features depending on the deployment style is also available on MSDN.

If your head is dizzy with the myriad VS services and APIs, from EnvDTE to Shell.Interop, this should clarify a couple things.

Go straight to the site if you want: http://nudoq.org. You can then come back and continue reading :)