Carlos Quintero's blog

If extensibility with add-ins is hard sometimes (or most of the time), creating setups for add-ins is incredibly difficult always, no matter which installer technology you use. If COM-based add-ins of VS.NET 2002/2003 (still supported in VS 2005, 2008 and 2010) were complicated (they required COM-based registration and Windows Registry-based registration), XML-based add-ins of VS […]

There is a sticky VSX FAQ post in the Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Forum since more than one year ago that is intended to collect the FAQs about development of Visual Studio extensions (packages, add-ins, templates, isolated shell, etc.). Unfortunately there aren’t many FAQ entries in each category, which is a pity. Today I have […]

I am these days creating setups of add-ins for Visual Studio using MSI and today when executing a setup intended for the current user (not for all users), not requiring admin rights, on Windows 2008 Server with a standard user account I have got the following error: “The system administrator has set policies to prevent […]

When I started the MZ-Tools articles series about developing add-ins for Visual Studio .NET some years ago, I didn’t think that its number would grow so much so I grouped them by type: HOWTO INFO PRB BUG At this point, with 170 articles at the time of this writing, it was even difficult for me […]

In the old times of Visual Basic 5.0 / 6.0 (which used the Office commandbars), those IDEs lacked the concept of commands that Visual Studio .NET 2002 introduced, and buttons (CommandBarButton) were created calling the CommandBar.Controls.Add method with suitable parameter values. The CommandBarButton class lacked the Click event (it was introduced in newer versions of […]

Another question that I have seen several times in the forums is how to intercept some keys in a toolwindow to perform special actions. An approach is described in my latest HOWTO article: HOWTO: Process the Esc or F1 keys in the toolwindow of a Visual Studio .NET add-in http://www.mztools.com/articles/2011/MZ2011016.aspx

While I have written a lot of articles and posts about the commandbars of Visual Studio (the most popular is HOWTO: Adding buttons, commandbars and toolbars to Visual Studio .NET from an add-in), I hadn’t written about the following case yet, that I use extensively in my own MZ-Tools add-in and that was mentioned at […]

Yesterday while writing the code of an add-in for a new article I was calling Form.ShowDialog() without passing the owner window and I noticed that clicking the Visual Studio button on the Windows 7 taskbar, I got the modal form hidden behind the Visual Studio window (I had to click Alt+Tab to get the it […]

This is one of those rare cases where both the Name and FullName properties of an EnvDTE.CodeElement can return an exception “by design”!: PRB: FullName and Name properties of EnvDTE.CodeElement return exceptions for using/Imports statements of C# and VB.NET http://www.mztools.com/articles/2011/MZ2011013.aspx Fortunately, there is an easy workaround.

Another question that is asked from time to time in the forums and whose answer requires some ellaboration and references to other articles: HOWTO: Create an add-in that targets several Visual Studio versions with the same add-in DLL using C# or VB.NET. http://www.mztools.com/articles/2011/MZ2011012.aspx