Carlos Quintero's blog

One of the things that you need to test in a Visual Studio 2012 add-in or package is that is themed correctly when the VS theme is changed dynamically from Dark to Light or viceversa (through the Tools, Options window). I noticed that sometimes the textboxes that show colorized C# or VB.NET code in my […]

After my first trip to the Microsoft campus at Seattle / Redmond back in April 2004 for the MVP Summit, shortly after being awarded as MVP, I returned with a boost of energy to do things related to the extensibility of Visual Studio with add-ins. One of the things was to start writing small articles […]

The other day a customer of MZ-Tools 7.0 reported an exception in the Sort Code Elements feature that after investigation turned out to be a bug of the file code model. I have documented it here: BUG: EnvDTE.CodeElement.StartPoint.Line wrong result with duplicated ‘using’ statement. http://www.mztools.com/articles/2012/MZ2012024.aspx And I have reported it to Microsoft Connect: EnvDTE.CodeElement wrong […]

I am thrilled to write about this new technique that I discovered only some days ago. While I have been using .NET Reflector since many years ago to disassemble .NET and Visual Studio assemblies to understand how they work, until now I had to use my brain as debugger when trying to figure out things. […]

So far there were two magic colors to be known by developers of Visual Studio add-ins: Almost green (RGB = 0, 254, 0) to get transparency in custom bitmaps of commands. See HOWTO: Create a command with a custom picture using a managed satellite DLL for a XML-based Visual Studio add-in. Magenta (RGB = 255, […]

OK, this is a post mainly for me (to be found in the future) because yesterday it was the second time that it happened (and I barely remembered the first one). It is a so subtle scenario that it can only happen if you create lots of add-ins for multiple versions of Visual  Studio (I […]

Continuing with the problems introduced by the new gray icons of Visual Studio 2012, my new article explains the approach that Microsoft used to solve this problem that I reported: Document Outline toolwindow of VS 2010 shows icons of VS 11 Beta (gray) https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/735124/document-outline-toolwindow-of-vs-2010-shows-icons-of-vs-11-beta-gray My MZ-Tools add-in provides a Control Explorer feature that is like […]

On Sep 12 Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2012, arguably the ugliest Visual Studio version ever launched according to very strong feedback from the community of developers. For the first time Visual Studio added support for themes. It is arguable if individual applications should be themed, or if themes should be provided by the operating system […]

This is another bug that happens in localized versions of Visual Studio when an add-in needs to re-create a command for whatever reason and it tries to preserve the existing command binding: BUG: Command.Bindings causes Exception when setting value from an add-in in localized Visual Studio. http://www.mztools.com/articles/2012/MZ2012021.aspx I have filed a bug through Microsoft Connect: […]

Visual Studio causes problems to developers of add-ins in localized versions (as I blogged four years ago), but it is not the only one. The automation model of the VBA editor of Microsoft Office has also problems in localized versions. The CommandBar class has the Name and NameLocal properties for the English name and the […]