Carlos Quintero's blog

One of the most complex things of the automation model (EnvDTE/EnvDTE80) of Visual Studio is the set of classes/properties to manage the build configurations of solutions and projects, because of the complexity itself of the configuration model of Visual Studio with matrixes of configuration names/platform names per solution and per project (nothing to object here, […]

You would say that they should be “8.00” for VS 2005 and “9.00” for VS 2008, but somehow Microsoft changed the pattern and the actual results are “8.0” for VS 2005 and “9.0” for VS 2008. I found a bug today in the code for the next version of my MZ-Tools add-in because of this […]

Apart from fixing bugs and providing new features, VS 2008 SP1 includes a tiny welcome detail: it shows the Visual Studio version (“9”) in the icon of the shortcuts and in the icon of the main window caption. For those of us developing extensions for Visual Studio, we have to have several Visual Studio versions […]

It is conspicuous that the EnvDTE80.ErrorItems collection introduced by VS 2005 lacks an Add method to add errors to the ErrorList, so it was a common belief, apparently even within Microsoft and also mine until recently that only SDK packages can add errors to the ErrorList. There is good news: there is not only one […]

To deal with international versions of Visual Studio and other Microsoft products (such as Office) has always been tricky. I think to remember that many years ago some version of Excel went as far as localizing the VBA statements (or macro language before VBA, not sure now), so while in English you had: For i […]

While I don’t write VS packages with the SDK, sometimes I need to use the SDK documentation to get an interface/service (most of the time to answer some question in the forums, or to do something that can’t be achieved with the automation model EnvDTE for add-ins). Since I don’t know by heart the name […]

Most code files belong to a project, which can be C#, VB.NET, etc. and all the files of the project must be in the same language. VS 2005 introduced Web Site projects which allow to mix code files in different languages. In both cases, when you request the code model from the code file using […]

Three years ago I wrote the article PRB: ‘Could not copy temporary files to the output directory’ error building Visual Studio .NET add-in explaining the common cause for that error when running an add-in project. There is a second cause that happens when you have a dead devenv.exe process, which can happen from time to […]

The question “How do I retrieve a Command from a CommandBarControl?” has been posted in the forums at least a couple of times and my answer always was “It’s not possible” because the CommandBarControl lacks a Command property, which is the intuitive thing that one would think. It was not until today that I realized […]

Quite a few months ago I published a post that became quite popular about the Frustrations with command-line add-ins for Visual Studio, where it was mentioned a bug in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE which didn’t loaded command-line add-ins. Today I have found that Microsoft released a hotfix for this problem: FIX: A command-line add-in […]