Carlos Quintero's blog

It always fascinates me how “creative” we the developers can be solving problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place. For example, Microsoft has been too much creative in the last decade providing multiple tricky ways to solve the lack of transparency support in the original bitmap format. And now I am seeing in several […]

I am now investigating why the grayscale image that Visual Studio 2005 / 2008 generates for a disabled button is so horrible/blurry for pictures of add-in commands and so crisp and precise for pictures of VS commands. VS 2005 introduced True Color bitmaps (VS.NET 2003 used 16-color bitmaps) so it should be able to generate […]

I have found today three links on the web about issues with transparency in custom pictures of buttons that Office add-ins have suffered too: Alpha channels, masks, color keys, oh my! (By Eric Faller about the Office Ribbon) http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/11/27/ribbonx-image-faq.aspx How To Create a Transparent Picture For Office CommandBar Buttons (MSDN KB Article) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288771 How To […]

I think I forgot to blog about the resolution of this bug: devenv.exe /resetaddin doesn’t fully reset the add-in http://blogs.msmvps.com/carlosq/2009/06/23/devenv-exe-resetaddin-doesn-t-fully-reset-the-add-in.aspx whose Microsoft Connect bug report is: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=469322 The problem is, you see, that devenv.exe /resetaddin doesn’t remove permanent commandbars, only commands and buttons on commandbars. That means that if you are using permanent commandbars and […]

In my last post Visual Studio 2010 getting rid of satellite DLLs for add-ins I mentioned that VS 2010 will provide two approaches to avoid satellite DLLs for command pictures of add-ins: The first one was clear: command pictures will be able to be embedded in the own DLL of the add-in. The second one […]

Two years after I reported it, it seems that MS finally understood that this was a bug and I have been notified today that it is no longer closed as “By design” but as “Fixed”: Standard user unable to load/unload COM-based add-ins registered for all users with the VS 2008 Add-in Manager on Windows Vista […]