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What Is VSIP?
Q: .NET brings significant benefits to tool vendors, language vendors, and framework developers through the macro, add-in, and Visual Studio Integration Program (VSIP) extensibility features in the VS.NET environment, as well as through the ability to build class libraries and frameworks from the .NET Framework Class Library itself. Let's start with a quick rundown of what extensibility and integration options are available to developers and third-party vendors.
Robert Green: We [Microsoft] decided to create a single IDE, and bring all the programming languages and designers into that. We had all these partners who were helping us complete the lifecycle, doing analysis, modeling, and testing tools, and so on. We had this great community of partners, and we decided the best we could for them and our customers was to open up Visual Studio .NET and enable these guys to not only work well with Visual Studio, but work well inside Visual Studio. So we created the VSIP, and made available to partners the set of APIs that give them the ability to integrate into Visual Studio. The integration Crystal, Rational, and Compuware have achieved has been made possible because of the innate IDE extensibility of Visual Studio. In addition to the lifecycle vendors, this model also enables the language vendors. We have more than 20 languages in the .NET Framework, and we thought, "Wouldn't it be great if they could hook into the IDE as well?" They don't have to worry about IDE business, but can hook in and piggyback on our editor, our debugger, the IntelliSense, the dynamic help, and so on. This gives those language vendors the ability to leverage this great set of tools and this great IDE.
Q: What's different between the VSIP and the VBA program?
Bill Fisher: Obviously, it starts with a different set of technologies. The VBA SDK was for people who wanted to add programmability to their Windows applications. VSIP is about taking the same interfaces that Microsoft itself uses to add packages to the Visual Studio shell and allowing independent software companies to put their own innovations on top of the Visual Studio environment. So it's a far richer set of interfaces, with a lot more complexity, and it lets you do lot of interesting things, as the examples from the people at this roundtable demonstrate. There's almost no limit on the kinds of development tools you can add to the VS environment. Summit provides support for the VSIP partners, and we help them license the technology. In the case of the VSIP SDK, there's a license agreement with Microsoft, and we help them with that.
Q: Licensing VBA has always involved a lot of secrecy and not a few lawyers. For example, even the pricing is a pretty closely guarded secret. What exactly do you have to do to license VSIP?
Bill Fisher: There are two different ways you can tap into Visual Studio. One is by using the SDK that's part of Visual Studio and using what is called the automation model. That allows you to build add-ins for Visual Studio. There's quite a lot you can do with that. That's free. It's included in every version of Visual Studio. To go beyond that, to do what Microsoft itself has done, you use the VSIP SDK. You license that from Microsoft, and you pay an annual program fee of $10,000 to Microsoft for that. On top of that, there's no built-in cost. If you want to build packages that require Visual Studio, you don't have to pay any royalties. In that sense, it's very different from VBA. There is an option—and some customers are doing this sort of thing—to bundle one of its solutions with the Visual Studio product itself. So if you want to make Visual Studio a prerequisite to your product, there's no hidden cost. If you want to bundle Visual Studio, you pay Microsoft a license fee for each copy of Visual Studio you bundle.
Robert Green: With the automation model, there's an awful lot you can do with the macros and wizards in the box without needing to join VSIP. The VS.NET IDE includes more than 200 objects in its automation model. Like Office, VS.NET also includes the ability to record and create macros. So, if you want to scan through some code, highlight particular portions of the code, and add some notes to the task list, you don't need to join VSIP for that. If you want to create a new project model, add your own designers, and integrate deeply into Visual Studio .NET, that's when you'd join VSIP. The point being: There's an awful lot you can do with Visual Studio .NET out of the box.
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