Carlos Quintero's blog

UPDATE (Aug 22): this blog is definitively archived. Please visit my new web site and blog at http://www.visualstudioextensibility.com/ You may have noticed that this blog has been down for several days. Mine was not the only one, all the blogs of Microsoft MVPs at msmvps.com were affected by a severe performance issue of the old […]

Today I am writing the equivalent of this article for add-ins that I wrote originally almost 6 years ago: HOWTO: Get an OutputWindowPane to output some string from a Visual Studio add-in or macro http://www.mztools.com/articles/2008/MZ2008023.aspx but in this case natively (using services) for Visual Studio packages: HOWTO: Write to the output window panes from a […]

Although creating a toolwindow and hosting a usercontrol in a Visual Studio package seems easy (thanks to the package wizard), initializing the usercontrol to receive an instance of your package (or the value of some property of your package) is somewhat tricky. I have seen this question from time to time in the forums and […]

When you create a toolwindow with the Visual Studio package wizard, a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) usercontrol is used. If you are migrating an add-in to a package, chances are that your toolwindows use Windows Form usercontrols and you don’t want to change the forms technology (migrating the add-in to a package is enough work…). […]

I have updated my web site Resources about Visual Studio .NET extensibility with some links to the SLaks.Blog (of former MVP fellow Schabse Laks) about Visual Studio extensibility and versioning.  They are the following: Extending Visual Studio 2013, Part 1: Getting Started SLaks.Blog, October 2013 Extending Visual Studio 2013, Part 2: Core Concepts SLaks.Blog, November […]

I am using Visual Studio Online since a couple of months ago to great satisfaction adopting more and more of its features. One of them is continuous integration (CI) and gated check-ins. Yesterday I tried to check-in a modification of one of my add-ins converted to a Visual Studio package for the first time and […]

During the last years I have written small, practical, articles with code samples about how to do things with Visual Studio add-ins like this: HOWTO: Create a solution from a Visual Studio add-in http://www.mztools.com/articles/2011/MZ2011001.aspx And in the next years I hope to write lots of equivalent ones for Visual Studio packages, like this new one: […]

Following with the second and third strategies migrating from Visual Studio add-ins to packages, after defining and implementing an IHost interface, likely you will continue with an ISolution interface with properties like: public interface ISolution { bool IsOpen { get;} string Name { get;} string FullFileName { get;} … } Using the automation model (EnvDTE) […]

Two of the three strategies that I explained in my last post Strategies migrating from Visual Studio add-ins to packages involve to avoid the use of the automation model (EnvDTE). When you use an EnvDTE object, basically you do one of three things: to get/set properties, to invoke methods to perform actions and to get […]

Since the next Visual Studio version (“14”) will remove add-ins, the time has come for those of us still providing our products as add-ins (such as my MZ-Tools productivity add-in) to move to Visual Studio packages. In my view, there are three strategies: In the first one, you change the minimal number of things in […]