Visual Studio Extensibility.

This blog is about some of the things that I searched for, while on a Visual Studio Extensibility project . Extensibility documentations are notoriously difficult to go through and you spend a lot of time finding the stuff that you do really care about. One by one I will go through the things that I found useful.

One of the thing that is usually done on a extensibility project for Visual Studio is to bind to the events that are fired by Visual Studio, like on solution opened , removed, debug begin , done, project opened, closed, projectitem added, removed.

To bind to all these events we have to get the handle to the extensibility object DTE/DTE2 . In my previous post Visual Studio CommandBars , I have explained how to get this handle. Now DTE exposes Events class that in turn have all the events that we can get. Lets look at how to do this.

Events vairable to hold on to the build events of the project opened in Visual Studio.
private BuildEvents _buildEvents;

Events vairable to hold on to the Soultion events of the solution opened in Visual Studio.
private SolutionEvents _solutionEvents;

Events vairable to hold on to the project events of the project opened in Visual Studio.

//For CS project
private ProjectItemsEvents _projectItemEventsCs;

//For VB project
private ProjectItemsEvents _projectItemEventsVb;

Events vairable to hold on to the DTE events of the dte object.
private DTEEvents _dteEvents;

Getting the events is simple:-

//Getting the build event of the project.
_buildEvents = _dte.Events.BuildEvents;

//Binding the build events.
//On build Begin
_buildEvents.OnBuildBegin += buildEvents_OnBuildBegin;

//On build Done.
_buildEvents.OnBuildDone += buildEvents_OnBuildDone;

//Getting the solution events
_solutionEvents = _dte.Events.SolutionEvents;

//Binding the solution events.
//Project added to the solution
_solutionEvents.ProjectAdded += solutionEvents_ProjectAdded;

//Solution opened in the VS.
_solutionEvents.Opened += solutionEvents_Opened;

//Getting the DTE events.
_dteEvents = _dte.Events.DTEEvents;

//On bigining the shutdown of solution
_dteEvents.OnBeginShutdown += DteEvents_OnBeginShutdown;

//Project Items Events
// Getting the events for the CS project
_projectItemEventsCs = _dte.Events.GetObject("VBProjectItemsEvents") as ProjectItemsEvents;

// Getting the events for the VB project
_projectItemEventsVb = _dte.Events.GetObject("CSharpProjectItemsEvents") as ProjectItemsEvents;

//On project item removed from the project. (So are the event for ItemAdded, but no event for the change in the project item)
_projectItemEventsCs.ItemRemoved += new _dispProjectItemsEvents_ItemRemovedEventHandler(_projectItemEventsCs_ItemRemoved);
_projectItemEventsVb.ItemRemoved += new _dispProjectItemsEvents_ItemRemovedEventHandler(_projectItemEventsCs_ItemRemoved);

These were the ways to bind to the Visual Studio Solution and Project events. Now lets look at something to access and set the properties of the solution and projects .

To access the assembly name of the project:-
string assemblyName = _dte.Solution.Projects.Item(1).Properties.Item("AssemblyName").Value.ToString();

To set the assembly name:-
_dte.Solution.Projects.Item(1).Properties.Item("AssemblyName").Value = assemblyName;

To get the output path of the Project:-
string OutputPath = _dte.Solution.Projects.Item(1).ConfigurationManager.ActiveConfiguration.Properties.Item("OutputPath").Value.ToString();


To build the solution :-
_dte.Solution.SolutionBuild.Build(true);

To do a Debug build and Release Build for the project in Solution.
_dte.Solution.SolutionBuild.BuildProject("Debug", _dte.Solution.Projects.Item(1).FullName, true);
_dte.Solution.SolutionBuild.BuildProject("Release", _dte.Solution.Projects.Item(1).FullName, true);

To animate the Visual Studio Status Bar:-

_dte.StatusBar.Animate(true, vsStatusAnimation.vsStatusAnimationSave);
//To set value for the progress
_dte.StatusBar.Progress(false, "Done", 100, 100);
//To stop animation.
_dte.StatusBar.Animate(false, vsStatusAnimation.vsStatusAnimationSave);

To check the type of the Project :-

if (_dte.Solution.Projects.Item(1).Kind == PrjKind.prjKindVBProject)
{
projectType = ".vbproj";
}
else
{
projectType = ".csproj";
}

To load controls assembly into the ToolBox:-

Window toolBoxWindow = _dte.Windows.Item(Constants.vsWindowKindToolbox);
toolBoxWindow.Visible = true;
ToolBoxTabs tabs = ((ToolBox)toolBoxWindow.Object).ToolBoxTabs;
ToolBoxTab waspTab = tabs.Add("My tools");
_dte.ExecuteCommand("View.PropertiesWindow", "");
waspTab.Activate();
waspTab.ToolBoxItems.Item(1).Select();
waspTab.ToolBoxItems.Add("Controls", ControlsFilePath, vsToolBoxItemFormat.vsToolBoxItemFormatDotNETComponent);

Hope all the beings will find it useful while dealing with the VS extensibility.