mono - Where to get MonoTools for Visual Studio 2010/2012 plug-in. No luck with their web site as it is down

Question

I have been trying to get the MonoTools for Visual Studio from their web site (mono-tools.com). But with no luck. Where to get MonoTools for Visual Studio 2010/2012 plug-in?

Aditya.

Answer 1

You can easily modify the MonoTools installer to work with VS2012. .vsix files are ZIP files. In the root of the zip, you'll see a file named extension.vsixmanifest, which lists the versions of Visual Studio that are supported by the extension.

Basically,

1. Download the MonoTools package
2. Rename it to have a .zip extension
3. Right-click and select "open" - you don't want to extract the file, just open the archive using the built-in Windows mechanism
4. Copy extension.vsixmanifest anywhere - say, to your desktop.
5. Open it up in a text editor (I love Notepad++, EMACS is also pretty awesome under OSX.)
6. Change the SupportedProducts key to the following:

<SupportedProducts>
  <VisualStudio Version="10.0">
    <Edition>VSTS</Edition>
    <Edition>VSTD</Edition>
    <Edition>Pro</Edition>
  </VisualStudio>
  <VisualStudio Version="11.0">
    <Edition>VSTS</Edition>
    <Edition>VSTD</Edition>
    <Edition>Pro</Edition>
  </VisualStudio>
</SupportedProducts>

1. Copy the modified file back into the archive.
2. Rename it from .zip to .vsix
3. Run it. The Visual Studio Version Selector should appear and let you pick VS2012.

If the Mono menu item doesn't appear after restarting VS, you may need to run

devenv /setup

from a VS command prompt (or, from c:program files (x86)microsoft visual studio 11common7ide).

This works for just about any VS2010 extension.