If you are developing Visual Studio extensions for your users, sooner or later you would have a functionality where you want to let users to configure some values. The best way to provide configurable options to users. So in this blog post I will show you how you can integrate your extension to Options window of Visual Studio. I will be giving a screenshots below of Visual Studio Options window created in Avanade Extensions for VS2013 – a Visual Studio extension created by me along with Tarun Arora. ......
Lately I am busy working on developing a small shell extension. There is a functionality in my shell extension, that user opens the .NET windows form by right clicking on a file (context menu). The user then decides to close the parent explorer window (instead of closing the windows form opened). Now, in such a case I would like to close the windows form too. So, to achieve this I had to subscribe to the close event of the windows explorer. The below code shows the how to achieve the same. Although ......
Ever since I got to know about existence of shell extension programming for Windows I always wanted to write one. The utilities provided by shell extensions is umpteen in Windows. However, being a C# developer has always limited me to get in to shell programming as its majorly based on C/Win32 programming. Moreover till .NET 4.0, writing shell extensions using managed code was not supported officially (MSDN). However if you assume that there are readily available examples to start development right ......
If you ever tried to use/load third party assemblies inside your Visual Studio add-in or extensions, there is a good chance that you would have ran in to exception. This is because, Visual Studio extensions are hosted by Visual Studio process and they run in Visual Studio’s app domain. Extension on their own do not have their application domains. However, there is a bright side and you can still load the assemblies you want. The trick is that, when Visual Studio tries to load the assemblies it tries ......