Carlos Quintero's blog

Although not very usual, add-ins can be created for the Macros IDE too. In fact, version 6.0 of MZ-Tools integrates with the VS IDE and with its macros IDE. I will remove support for the macros IDE in future versions because I think that nobody needs/uses it and it complicates the code and the setup […]

Joginder Nahil (from Starprint Tools) has notified me about a breaking change that I was not aware in the new WPF-based commandbars of VS 2010: the lack of support to create comboboxes on commandbars. I have been fortunate enough to avoid the need to use that UI item in my MZ-Tools add-in (I haven’t even […]

I have updated an article that I wrote back in 2005: HOWTO: Getting properties from the DTE.Properties collection of Visual Studio .NET. http://www.mztools.com/articles/2005/MZ2005008.aspx And the reason is that I have found lately that guessing the names of properties to index DTE.Properties(category, page) is not as easy as reading the MSDN documentation (whose list may not […]

When you execute the following macro that gets the file templates for classes, forms and text files in C# and VB.NET: Sub Macro1() Dim objSolution2 As EnvDTE80.Solution2 objSolution2 = CType(DTE.Solution, EnvDTE80.Solution2) MsgBox(objSolution2.GetProjectItemTemplate(“Class.zip”, “VisualBasic”)) MsgBox(objSolution2.GetProjectItemTemplate(“Form.zip”, “VisualBasic”)) MsgBox(objSolution2.GetProjectItemTemplate(“Text.zip”, “VisualBasic”)) MsgBox(objSolution2.GetProjectItemTemplate(“Class.zip”, “CSharp”)) MsgBox(objSolution2.GetProjectItemTemplate(“Form.zip”, “CSharp”)) MsgBox(objSolution2.GetProjectItemTemplate(“Text.zip”, “CSharp”)) End Sub It fails for the 6th case: objSolution2.GetProjectItemTemplate(“Text.zip”, “CSharp”) I thought […]

These are two “minor” bugs that the new WPF-based commandbars of Visual Studio 2010 are going to have since won’t be fixed in this release: VSIP: VS 2010 Dec LCTP: toolbar with CommandBar.RowIndex = -1 not created in new row https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/518455 VSIP: VS 2010 Dec LCTP: CommandBar.RowIndex of toolbar not updated after creating and making […]

This is another issue that I can now make public since it won’t be fixed and I guess that VS 2010 RC has it too: EnvDTE.FontsAndColorsItems.Item(textEditorItem).Background returns 0 instead of actual background color https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/518919 This can affect you if your add-in uses RichTextBoxes to colorize code simulating a code window. I think that VS 2010 […]

In VS 2005 and 2008 (but not in VS.NET 2002 or 2003), you could press the Shift key while VS was being launched to prevent the loading of add-ins that were marked to load on startup. This was very useful for developers of add-ins to prevent the following issue: PRB: ‘Could not copy temporary files […]

This is something that happened me three days ago when I installed VS 2010 RC for the first time. I have tried to reproduce it several times to no avail, so I haven’t opened a Microsoft Connect report. FWIW, I will post here what happened just in case some of you want to test. First, […]

I noticed yesterday that an enhanced version of the ADO.NET Connection Assistant feature of my MZ-Tools add-in causes an exception for OLEDB connection in VS 2010 RC, not in VS 2008 or 2005. After a couple of hours debugging and trying to figure out why, I finally noticed that VS 2010 RC also suffers that […]

In the last couple of weeks two important things happened: after several secret LCTPs, Microsoft released a new public build of VS 2010 (the Release Candidate), and… I got married 🙂 I spent the honeymoon at Argentina, which has arguably the most impressive natural wonder of planet Earth (the Iguazu Falls), and impressive glaciers too […]