Manual Deployment of Visual Studio Add-Ins

To deploy visual studio addin you have to place the AddIn file in this directory:

My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Addins\

Open the AddIn file. You will see XML seems the following:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-16″ standalone=”no”?>
<Extensibility xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/AutomationExtensibility”>
<HostApplication>
<Name>Microsoft Visual Studio</Name>
<Version>8.0</Version>
</HostApplication>
<Addin>
<FriendlyName>Sample Addin</FriendlyName>
<Description>Sample Addin Description</Description>
<Assembly>D:\mysampleaddin\bin\SampleAddin.dll</Assembly>
<FullClassName>SampleAddin.Connect</FullClassName>
<LoadBehavior>1</LoadBehavior>
<CommandPreload>1</CommandPreload>
<CommandLineSafe>0</CommandLineSafe>
</Addin>
</Extensibility>

Change the Assembly value to be the path of your addin DLL.

Change the full class name to be (<YourClassName>.Connect)

Then you will be ready to see your addin in the visual studio