where are custom extensions installed in visual studio?

visual-studio-extensions vsix vsx vs-extensibility
Yituo picture Yituo · Jun 16, 2016 · Viewed 31k times · Source

Where are custom extensions installed in Visual Studio? I know you could get path though ExtensionManager.GetInstalledExtensions(), however it seems none of the paths found corresponds to my extension.

Answer

Matze picture Matze · Jun 16, 2016

Extensions (if deployed as VSIX) will be installed to the user´s profile; each extension will be installed into a folder with a random name, for instance: 

%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Extensions\s5lxc0ne.1kp

If you want to obtain the package installation path at runtime, you can obtain that information from the assembly that defines the Package class.

static string GetAssemblyLocalPathFrom(Type type)
{
    string codebase = type.Assembly.CodeBase;
    var uri = new Uri(codebase, UriKind.Absolute);
    return uri.LocalPath;
}

...

string installationPath = GetAssemblyLocalPathFrom(typeof(MyPackage));

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