The other day in the Microsoft/extendvs Gitter room, Amadeusz Wieczorek asked if he could use the command-line vsix installer to install an extension into a root suffix of his choice.
Scenario
He explained that he had an issue where Roslyn deploys only to /RoslynDev and his extension deploys only to /Exp when debugging it. He wanted to manually drop one of them to the other root suffix.
Amadeusz mentioned to Alex Eyler, who is in the VS Team, that he’d heard there is a new command line switch.
Details
Alex replied that yes, there is in Dev15 - /rootSuffix. But he thought that it has some issues with nested extensions.
The odd thing was when I checked the help dialog, the /rootSuffix switch isn’t shown among the rest of the switches in the help screen.
I checked the version number in the properties dialog of vsixinstaller.exe, and it shows the version number as 15.0.26323.1, so I was definitely using the VSIX V3 installer that was released with VS 2017 (aka Dev15).
I haven’t had time to try it out myself yet, so if anyone knows for sure whether this method works or not, please let me know and I’ll update this blog post.