Carlos Quintero's blog

Traditionally the VSLangProjXX.dll files contain interfaces such as VBProjectPropertiesX, CSharpProjectConfigurationPropertiesY and VSLangProj90.dll contains them but it seems that it was forgotten to add properties to them: BUG: Empty interfaces in VSLangProj90.dll http://www.mztools.com/articles/2008/MZ2008018.aspx

I was getting the error “Package ‘Visual Studio Explorers and Designers Package’ has failed to load properly” when working with add-ins in VS 2008 since a couple of days ago, along with “COM object that has been separated from its underlying RCW cannot be used” some other times. While I had seen the second error working with […]

I have been struggling during the last day to get a list of actual project type Guids (EnvDTE.Project.Kind property), since not all the Guids that appear in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\Projects registry key are actual project type Guids that appear in project or solution files. Here is the result list: INFO: List of known project type Guids […]

Many months ago I reported to Microsoft through Microsoft Connect an InvalidCastException that happened when using the EditPoint.FindPattern with .sql files of a database project of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite (or VS 2008 Edition for DB Professionals) Beta 2: EditPoint.FindPattern causes InvalidCastException on SQL editor of VSTS for DB Professional projectshttp://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=295427 As I reported, […]

As you may know if you are a C# add-in programmer, DTE events can get disconnected if you don’t hold a class variable pointing to them (VB.NET add-in programmers tend to use the WithEvents approach which already uses a class variable so they don’t suffer this problem). Although this issue is well documented in MSDN, […]

As you may know, while the general Visual Studio automation model uses the EnvDTE DLL series (EnvDTE.dll, EnvDTE80.dll, EnvDTE90.dll), there are some extension DLLs for the automation model of VB.NET and C#, the VSLangProj DLL series (VSLangProj.dll, VSLangProj2.dll, VSLangProj80.dll and VSLangProj90.dll). For more information, see my article INFO: Assemblies used in Visual Studio Extensibility. Apart from […]

Today I had to get the target .NET Framework of a VS 2008 project. While the project file stores the values as “v2.0”, “v3.0”, etc, the values returned by the automation model are a bit surprising at first glance. Here is the article that I wrote about this: HOWTO: Get the target .NET Framework of a […]

Just in case you are not aware of this yet (I found a problem related to this today in the MSDN forum), Visual Studio CommandBars don’t have unique names, which means that retrieving a specific commandbar such as “Project” with this code can fail returning a commandbar that you didn’t expect: DTE.CommandBars.Item(“Project”) In fact, there […]