Publish the extension for Visual Studio 2026 to the Visual Studio Marketplace

[oronf-mda]

Please publish the DotVVM extension for Visual Studio 2026 to the marketplace, so it can be installed with the Extension Manager.

Since the version of the DotVVM extension always has to match the exact Visual Studio version (which is strange as no other extension I have used has this issue), having the ability to update it within VS would be easier.

[tomasherceg]

We are aware of the issue, but unfortunately, there is no easy fix.

Our extension interacts with a non-public Visual Studio API, which is not officially supported. That's the reason why it is so sensitive to a specific version of Visual Studio - there are many binary breaking changes, and we need to recompile our code to accommodate that.

Unfortunately, it is the only way to implement DotVVM-specific features while getting all the functionality of Visual Studio's built-in HTML editor. We started working on a new version that would communicate via the Language Server Protocol and run out of process (which would resolve the DLL version conflicts we are experiencing). However, this is a significant amount of work, and as part of that, we must implement full HTML support ourselves, as LSP doesn't support language inheritance.

The problem is this:

• Visual Studio 2022 is currently at version 17.14.*
• Visual Studio 2026 is currently at version 18.1.*

Visual Studio extensions can declare VS versions with which they are compatible:

• DotVVM for VS 2022 declares [17.0, 18.0) where left parenthesis means >=, right parenthesis means <
• DotVVM for VS 2026 declares [18.0, 19.0)

Even this is wrong - the latest version of DotVVM for VS 2022 works only with version 17.14.23, but it has to declare support for [17.0, 18.0). The reason is that the VS Marketplace and the Extensions tab in Visual Studio display only the latest version of each extension. If we declare support for [17.14.23, 18.0), the extension would not be visible to users who are not running the latest version of Visual Studio. This has been a problem for the entire time, and there is no solution.

The problem with VS 2026 is that it shows even extensions that are compatible with version 17.14. Even though the extension explicitly states it doesn't work with version 18.0 or higher, it is still displayed. This is the reason you can see DotVVM for Visual Studio 2022 in VS 2026.

The third issue is that the Visual Studio Marketplace currently does not allow uploading extensions that support API version 18.0 or higher. Therefore, we are not able to publish VS 2026 extension at all, and the only way to get it is to find it at the Release notes page in our documentation.

The only idea I got while writing this post is to declare support for [17.14, 19.0) in DotVVM for VS 2026 and publish it on the marketplace. Both versions of the extension would be visible in both versions of VS, but it would be less confusing than what we have now.