Carlos Quintero's blog

If you have tried to create an add-in with the wizard in the March 2007 CTP of Visual Studio “Orcas”, you will have noticed that when you try to debug the add-in, it is not loaded. In fact, it does not appear in the Add-In Manager of the second instance of Visual Studio. This is […]

When you want to know programatically the IDE mode (design, debug or run-time) it happens that the DTE.Mode property returns only two of the three possible modes (I don’t know why Microsoft omitted the Run Mode in the vsIDEMode enum). In this article I explain how to distinguish among the three modes: HOWTO: Guessing the […]

This question appears from time to time in forums, so I wrote an article about it:  HOWTO: Initializing new events in Visual Studio macroshttp://www.mztools.com/articles/2007/MZ019.htm When it was already written I discovered that a very similar one appears in the MSDN docs: How to: Create an Event Handler in a Macro for a Specific Type of Projecthttp://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228948(VS.80).aspx

A couple of weeks ago a received an error report from a customer of my MZ-Tools add-in saying that VS 2005 failed to load it with error “Unknown error” and error code 0x80131018. Searching my e-mail history it happened that that error was already reported by a previous customer months ago, but it was not clear how […]

This is another article that I wanted to write long time ago and now that I discovered how to get a service from a Visual Studio add-in and the Data Design Extensibility (DDEX) SDK, I have written it today. It is a question that keeps appearing in the forums:  HOWTO: Get data sources, data providers and data […]

When you are looking for a property using Properties.Item(“property_name”) and you don’t know the property_name, this article may come handy: HOWTO: Guess the names of a Properties collection from a Visual Studio add-in or macro http://www.mztools.com/articles/2007/MZ017.htm