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Visual Studio Extension

The Wikidown Visual Studio extension surfaces your wiki's docs/ folder directly in Solution Explorer — without it participating in the build.

Install

1. Open Extensions → Manage Extensions in Visual Studio 2022 or later.
2. Search for Wikidown in the Marketplace tab and click Install.
3. Restart Visual Studio when prompted.

Alternatively, download Wikidown.Vs.vsix directly from the Visual Studio Marketplace and double-click to install.

Add a Wikidown project to your solution

1. Right-click the solution node in Solution Explorer and choose Add → New Project.
2. Search for Wikidown (or filter by project type Wikidown).
3. Select Wikidown Wiki and click Next.
4. Give the project a name (default: wiki) and pick any folder you like — the location field defaults sensibly — then click Create.

When the project is created, the extension looks for an existing docs/ folder near the project file (checking the project folder and up to two parent folders). If it finds one, the new project points at it; if not, it creates a docs/ folder next to the project file seeded with a starter Home.md page. The wiki folder appears immediately under the new project node in Solution Explorer.

Configure the wiki root

By default the project looks for a docs/ folder next to the .wikidownproj file. Edit the file to point to a different location:

<WikidownProject>
  <WikiRoot>my-wiki</WikiRoot>   <!-- relative to the .wikidownproj file -->
</WikidownProject>

Features

• Presents the wiki the way Azure DevOps does: nodes show page titles (dashes render as spaces, no .md extension), a page with a same-named subpage folder is a single expandable node, .order files are hidden, and pages sort by .order (listed entries first, then alphabetical).
• Double-clicking a page opens it in VS's built-in markdown editor.
• Right-click the project, a folder, or a page for the standard context menus, including the Git submenu, plus wiki-native commands:
  • Add Page… prompts for a name, creates the page, and records it in .order.
  • Add Folder… creates a folder plus a same-named page beside it, following the CLI's subpage convention.
  • Add Existing Pages… copies .md files in and records them.
  • Move Page Up / Move Page Down reorder the page within its folder's .order.
  • Edit Page Order opens the folder's .order in the editor (creating it from the current display order if missing).
  • Delete Page (a page and, for pages with children, its subpages) and Delete Folder confirm and then delete — your git history is the undo.
  • Export to PDF... — right-click the project root, a folder, or a page and export it to a single linked PDF: the selected node plus all of its descendants (the project root exports the whole wiki). Prompts for a save location, then generates the PDF the same way wikidown export-pdf does (cover page, table of contents, per-page bookmarks/outline, embedded fonts) — the extension bundles the CLI internally, so no separate install step is needed. Offers to open the finished PDF when done.
• Everything stays consistent with the wikidown CLI and the wiki_* MCP tools, which remain fully usable side by side — the tree refreshes live when they change files or reorder .order.
• The project node is display-only — it never appears in Build, Rebuild, or Clean, and adds no compile items to the solution.

Add an existing project to a .sln manually

If you prefer to hand-edit the solution file, use the Wikidown project type GUID:

Project("{6a9c3f4b-d5e8-4f0a-b1c2-345678901bcd}") = "wiki", "wiki.wikidownproj", "{<new-guid>}"
EndProject

Related

• CLI — wikidown dotnet tool for editing from the terminal or a CI pipeline.
• MCP Server — stdio MCP server for AI agents (Claude, Copilot).
• Editor — browser-based Blazor editor that commits directly to your repo.