VMware plug-in not working in Visual Studio 2013

[kfujieda]

VMware plug-in accompanied with VMware workstation 10.1 isn't working in Visual Studio 2013. It is officially supported in VS2005 and VS2008, and It also works in VS2010 and VS2012. It isn't working only in VS2013. The VMware menu item isn't shown in the main menu bar. Please let me know the plug-in should work in VS2013 or not.

[DaveTheWaveSlav]

Gee, not exactly a thundering response from VMware or the community on this one...

I found your post after asking a similar question on MDSN:

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Hi all,

I need to know if Visual Studio 2013 supports the Vmware Workstation 10 Visual Studio Plug-in.  I have the plug-in installed into vmware workstation, but it doesn't show up in Visual Studio 2013 like is did in Visual Studio 2010 & 2012.

All I find online is that Visual Studio 2013 now 'depreciates' plug-ins and that you should upgrade to VSPackage extensions (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/19dax6cz.asp).  Usually depreciation implies that something is still supported if not encouraged. But it looks to me like all plug-in support has been removed.  (?)

I've looked, and can't find any VSPackage that supports Vmware debugging, either in the VS Extensions & Updates gallery, on Vmware's site (other then others complaining about the apparent loss, with no responses https://communities.vmware.com/thread/473706) or anywhere on the internet.

Has this feature just been silently dropped by Microsoft & Vmware?  If so, what are my options?  I have a situation that's perfect for the capability I expected to be there and was surprised by it's disappearance.  My app crashes in a VM test environment but not on my machine.

Thanks in advance.

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So, what's the deal, VMware, did you guys (Microsoft, VMware, or both) silently drop support for the VMware debugging plugin?  If so, will we ever see it return, either as a VSPackage, or is it dead?

Personally, I'm a pretty unhappy with how how this major feature for developers was dropped without any release notes by either vendor.  I need the feature, and it's been silently 'disappeared'.  I have a deadline, my app is crashing in the VM test environment, and my go-to tool is gone.  What am I supposed to do, reinstall VS 2012 and back-port my projects to it?

At least you could give the guy who posted the question two months ago a reply explaining the situation.  128 views - someone's interested.  To prevent folks like me from wasting valuable time searching an apparently intentional 'radio-silence' to try to understand what's going on.

Sorry, I'm just a little ticked - you just ate my weekend.  I expect better support & documentation than this.

[Linjo]

This is not an official VMware Support Forum, this is a community based forum around VMware products.

To get official support your options are listed here: https://www.vmware.com/support/workstation.html

[DaveTheWaveSlav]

For what it's worth, I opened a support ticket thru my employer.  Weeks passed.  Their tech support engineers contacted me and were able to reproduce the problem.  More weeks passed.  Then they attempted to contact me when I was out of the country and incommunicado for a few weeks.  Then they promptly closed the ticket, even though they acknowledged the issue but never fixed it to my knowledge.

Does anyone know if Workstation 11 might address the issue?  I've gone back to 9 and will stay there until there's a compelling reason to upgrade and the show-stopper issues have been fixed.

[fubvmware]

We fixed several Visual Studio related issue in Workstation 11, it should work with VS 2013, please give it a try.