Installing EF Power Tools into VS2015

Posted 2020-08-09 jimson

TLDR: If you don’t want to do the tasks (even though they are so easy) you can download the updated VSIX I created from here.

The Entity Framework Power Tools extension for Visual Studio has been around for quite some time and is still called a Beta. I cannot live without it’s “View Entity Data Model (Read-Only)” feature which I used to validate my code first models.

But if you try to install the extension into Visual Studio 2015, you won’t find it.

Checking the extension in Visual Studio Gallery, you’ll see that it hasn’t been updated to install into VS2015.

The fix is nothing more than making it know about VS2015. There are no other compatibility problems that I have experienced. Modifying an extensions installation package (which is just a zip file!) to be aware of another version of Visual Studio is pretty easy. Here are the steps to get the EF Power Tools into VS2015.

Download the extension from the Visual Studio Gallery page.

Find the file

and change it’s extension to zip.

Extract the files from the zip file.

Open the extension.vsixmanifest file in a text editor and find the Supported Products section.

And copy paste one of the Visual studio elements, changing the version to 14.0. I have the Enterprise version but didn’t bother changing it from Pro here and it didn’t seem to be a problem.

Now you have to reverse your steps in order to recreate the VSIX file.

Select the files in the extracted folder and zip them. Don’t zip the folder. The files have to be at the root. (Guess how I learned that! ) I named my zip file VSPowerTools15.zip

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rename the file to have the vsix extension.

Run the file right from here.

Voila!

If Visual Studio was open, you’ll have to restart to get this to kick in.

Also you’ll see Entity Framework Power Tools listed in the installed extensions when you look at the About section of Visual Studio 2015.

I accidentally mistook this for something it was NOT and (embarrassingly) tweeted it. I had forgotten that I had done this for the VS2015 preview. Then I installed VS2015 RTM on top of the preview and that picked up all of the installed extensions. When I saw the power tools listed in About, I thought they had a) finally gotten rid of the “Beta” tag and b) installed automatically with VS2015. When I realized the extension was installed, I uninstalled that and indeed the tool went away. So for anyone who saw that tweet…. sorry! Guilty as charged …