Carlos Quintero's blog

Since I didn’t attend the PDC 2008, I have started to watch some recorded sessions. While the most interesting one for people extending Visual Studio (“TL32 Microsoft Visual Studio: Customizing and Extending the Development Environment” by Tim Wagner) that I mentioned in my last post is not available yet (I guess it will be posted […]

Last Thursday October 23 the VSX Team blog announced a VSX Talk at the upcoming PDC that contained this very interesting news: “The next version of Visual Studio moves beyond add-ins and packages to unleash powerful new ways to customize and extend the environment. Learn about the Visual Studio extension model-built on a common Microsoft […]

I have discovered today by chance that there was a new assembly EnvDTE90a.dll on my machine, whose namespace EnvDTE90a is documented in the MSDN docs: EnvDTE90a Namespace http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/envdte90a.aspx As you may know, the common automation model is supplied by a set of EnvDTEXX.dll assemblies: EnvDTE.dll (provided by VS.NET 2002 and higher) EnvDTE80.dll (provided by VS […]

Microsoft has just post the screencasts of most sessions of the Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Developer Conference 2008 back in September. I didn’t attend because it is a long trip (I live in Madrid – Spain-), a flight to Seattle is not direct (you need a stopover in France, England, Netherlands or in the US) […]

Continuing today with some tests about the The OnConnection method and ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_UISetup of Visual Studio add-ins of my last post, I created a sample add-in using the code of the first sample (temporary UI) of my article HOWTO: Adding buttons, commandbars and toolbars to Visual Studio .NET from an add-in, and later I changed my […]

Without doubt, the most confusing area each newbie add-in developer faces when starting to write an add-in for Visual Studio, is the OnConnection method and the  ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_UISetup value of the connectMode parameter. I think that every week I answer at least one question about this in the MSDN forums. There are several things contributing this […]

I already wrote about the convoluted build configuration automation model and provided a visual representation of it to help understanding it. One of the problems that I explained is that the configurations of solutions are modeled as a collection rather than as a 2-D matrix (configuration names and platforms), as it happens with project configurations, […]

In my last entry I mentioned that I was investigating to use XML registration (.AddIn File) with my MZ-Tools add-in. Finally I was unable because it seems that Visual Studio 2005/2008 managed add-ins using XML registration don’t support unmanaged satellite DLLs (created with C++) for custom pictures for commands. The .AddIn file doesn’t support the […]