Aaron Marten : Automation

Extension Manager

aaronmar — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:40:40 GMT

One of the new features we plan on shipping for VS 2010 that I've been heads down on for the past few months is the "Extension Manager". I'll be posting more details about it here over the next several months.

For the meantime, you can hear more about it (and see some very early mockups) in Dr. Tim Wagner's PDC talk. The part about the Extension Manager starts around 50:20. The earlier parts of the talk discuss some of the other new features that we're working on, including the new MEF-based editor extensibility model, the VS Gallery, and a general introduction to VS extensibility.

Match Options Command Addin

aaronmar — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:56:01 GMT

A while back, there was some interest on the VSX forum around adding back functionality to have "Match Case" and "Match Whole Word" buttons on the toolbar in Visual Studio 2005. At the time, I created a little addin to do this and just posted it to a website I had access to.

In the meantime, I accidentally deleted the files from the web server (oops). Also, some folks have been asking if there was a version that works with Visual Studio 2008.

I've set up a page on the MSDN Code Gallery to be a permanent home for this addin. I've released files that will allow you to install the addin for both Visual Studio 2005 & 2008. You can also download the sources if you're interested. Please open any bugs you find on the Issue Tracker page. Enjoy!

VSX Videos on Channel 9

aaronmar — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:08:24 GMT

Yesterday, Ken Levy and I sat down with Dan from Channel 9 to have an unscripted discussion about Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) (including finding a bug live during an untested, on-the-fly demo!). We also discussed creating your own Visual Studio Shell and show off how to add a new package to a VS Shell application, among other things. Check it out:

Ken and Aaron discuss VSX

In another video, Anthony and Ken also show off the Visual Studio Gallery that was announced this morning:

Anthony and Ken discuss the Visual Studio Gallery

Scripting Visual Studio with Windows PowerShell

aaronmar — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:34:20 GMT

One of the really cool new things that shipped recently that I've been trying to learn more about is Windows Powershell. What's really great about it is that if your object supports COM or .NET, you can automate it just by firing up the command line.

To get an instance of Visual Studio running, I can do the following :

$dte = New-Object -comobject "VisualStudio.DTE"

(Note that if you have multiple versions installed you can specify VisualStudio.DTE.7.0 for VS 2002, VisualStudio.DTE.7.1 for VS 2003 or VisualStudio.DTE.8.0 for VS 2005.)

Since the DTE object was created via code and not by a user action, VS runs in silent mode (no user interface shown). I can show the main form with:

$dte.MainWindow.Visible = $true

For a useless example, if I want to close all the windows in the shell, I can do the following:

foreach ($w in $dte.Windows) { $w.Close() }

The cool thing about this really isn't that I can script Visual Studio (I could already do that from IronPython, VBScript or any other environment that can talk to COM objects), but that I can do it from the same command line that I use for other tasks in Windows.