Visual Studio 2012 Add-In - How to share/publish/deploy it?

Question

I have been working on a Visual Studio solution template to be used internally and have been developing this in a Visual Studio 2012 Addin.

The addin is added to the tools menu of Visual Studio and all works fine.

The only question now is, how can I share this tool between my team?

I have added a VSIX project, which in turn references the Solution Template project (added as an asset) but will this alone do it?

I can't see how installing the VSIX I created is manually going to add my add-in to the Visual Studio Tools window.

Can anyone offer any advice as to how I can do this or is there some other way to deploy/publish a Visual Studio addin?

I have found a tutorial which is similar, but I just want to use the VSIX to install my add-in to Visual Studio tools menu, rather than add it as a project template. I have looked around and there doesn't seem to be much information on how to deploy your addin.

Answer 1

It seems addins are soon to be deprecated with the next release of Visual Studio, although I have found this article on how to convert an addin to a VSPackage.

And with a VSPackage I will be able to deploy using VSIX.

There are also some tutorials on VSPackages here.