VS Extensibility Articles

These are the list of useful articles for developing add-ins fro Visual Studio:

1. Discovering Code with the Code Model (Visual C#)
2. Automation Object Model Chart 

Write in VS output window

Visual Studio had very nice extensibility features and very useful add-ons can be developed top of VS IDE. I decided to create an add-on for exploring the CodeModel of one of the projects which I developed before. usually the first add-on is a typical “Hello World” message, then its time to do some serious stuff.

One of the necessary things when creating add-ons for IDE is ability to write into output panels. This can be an efficient way of communicating to the developer instead of creating lots of MessageBoxes. Following code snippet will explain how to do so

EnvDTE.OutputWindowPane codeModelPane = null;
foreach (EnvDTE.OutputWindowPane pane in dte.ToolWindows.OutputWindow.OutputWindowPanes)
{
if (pane.Name == “NewPane”)
{
codeModelPane = pane;
}
}
if (codeModelPane == null)
codeModelPane = dte.ToolWindows.OutputWindow.OutputWindowPanes.Add(“NewPane”);

codeModelPane.OutputString(“A message for developer!”);

Microsoft Tutorials are quite useful for creating extensions for Visual Studio: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/vsx/bb507746.aspx