Carlos Quintero's blog

A developer posted a couple of days ago in the MSDN forum about Visual Studio Extensibility that loading his add-in caused and exception with error number <Unknown Error> (8013141A). Of course, searching with Google doesn’t always offer much information about these bizarre errors, nor the tools of the Windows SDK for which this error is, […]

Numbering is quite easy for any normal person (or even child) that you ask: 1, 2, 3, 4… For programmers it begins to get weird since many of them would say 0, 1, 2, 3… and when programmers need to version things, it goes absolutely crazy. It should be easy, though: a major number, a […]

Being developers I guess we all get the same feeling when some user of our application tell us that the app “doesn’t work”, or “it gives me an error” without further details. I am always tempted to reply “it works for me” to the first case and “which are the ‘first name’ and ‘last name’ […]

I’m sure this is a question that every developer of extensions for Visual Studio, whether add-ins or packages, wonders from time to time. If you develop extensions for in-house use, you can drive, incentivate or even force your organization to migrate to the latest version of Visual Studio. But if you develop extensions commercially, things […]

I am these days trying to create a single .NET application that can automate all the Visual Studio versions installed on a machine (from Visual Studio .NET 2002 to Visual Studio 2010). For that purpose I have created a .NET application using Visual Studio .NET 2002 so it uses .NET Framework 1.0, which can run […]

Today I have found the setting in the Community Server that hosts this blog that sets if the whole post or just a summary is published in the RSS feed. It was configured by default to publish only the summary so you got a “Read more…” at the end of an excerpt of each post […]

Basically you could use three kind of forms in your add-ins: Modal forms: these are regular forms that are shown modally and block the UI until you dismiss them. For example, the Options window of Visual Studio. Modeless forms: there are regular forms that are shown non-modally. For example, the Find dialog of the old […]

Each time that a new Visual Studio version appears on the horizon I guess that every add-in developer wonders about the question of how to make his add-in to support that new version: can I use the same current binary DLL that I have (with some tweaks)? Do I need a separate binary? The question […]

Today I received in the e-mail a question about how to create a commandbar popup with an image in a Visual Studio add-in. The short answer is that commandbar popups can’t have images but I will ellaborate it here a bit more. First, we need to define what a commandbar popup is. A commandbar popup […]

There is a problem that I have never experienced but it was happening for a few people in Visual Studio 2005 / 2008. The symptoms were: The Add-In Manager is empty The Add-In only shows registry-based add-ins, not XML-based add-ins (using an .AddIn file) Of course the first difficulty was to notice that the problem […]