COM Shim Wizards
I mentioned ages ago that I've been working on a set of Visual Studio wizards for building unmanaged (COM) shims for managed extensions. By 'extensions', I mean add-ins, smart tags and realtime data components. All of these should be shimmed. VSTO codebehind assemblies and smart doc assemblies are shimmed by default, because they're both loaded by the VSTO loader. Similarly, you can optionally setup smart tags to be VSTO-loaded, and therefore default-shimmed.
I've detailed the reasons why you should shim your managed extensions in an article which should be out on MSDN very soon. There'll be a link in the article for you to download the COM Shim Wizards setup.
So, why's it taken so long? Well, the work was done and ready to go back in May. Since then, there's been some design discussion around the implementation details. There's no question that the use of a shim is a good thing. The wizards work fine, and the current implementation of the shim itself also works just fine. So, the discussion was around 'will it work with Whidbey?' (Yes), and 'could we improve on the design?'. Well, you can (almost) always improve on a design, and certainly a good alternative has been suggested (by Misha, the original designer of the shim). Maybe I'll implement the alternative design in a later version of the shim, maybe not. We held off publishing the article and the wizards until we were sure we're doing the right thing.
Anyway, the short story is: building managed extensions is good; shimming managed extensions is good; the COM Shim Wizards make it easy to shim managed extensions (which is good).