This blog is now archived. Dr. eX, resident expert on anything to do with VSX, now posts on the VSX Team Blog tagged Dr. eX .

If you are an add-in developer, you are probably familiar with adding menu items and toolbar buttons to the Visual Studio environment. In most instances add-in developers take their cue from the code generated by the Visual Studio Add-in Project Wizard...

One of the most frequently asked questions related to Visual Studio Package and Add-in development concerns how to add additional menus and commands to a specific dropdown or context menu in the Visual Studio IDE. Adding the menu or command is the...

What? No email link to talk to the Doctor directly. Yes that is true the email link has been removed from the blog. Dr. Ex and his assistants recommend use of Visual Studio Extensibility Forum instead. Your questions get exposed to a broader audience...

Occasionally, Dr. Ex and his associates are asked where developers can get assistance with issues related to the Visual Studio SDK, and Add-in development. In actuality, there are a number of support options available for customers with questions and...

You can just picture the situation. You've coded up your package and tested it out on your development machine. You've even managed to get a setup project together. Everything is working just as expected, but when you run your setup on another machine...

Since we have placed the VS 2005 SDK 3.0 on the Microsoft Download Center in September, we have seen a lot of developers downloading the SDK. The developers who are using the SDK now are no longer just developers who build commercial VSIP products. Users...

Guess what the November 2006 CTP version of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK Version 4 has been released. You can get this release by signing into www.vsipmembers.com . One of the major themes for this release has been to serve our Control vendors who would...

Smells like VSIP … For a change of pace, I thought I would spend a little time talking about the VSIP Program and opportunities all the VS extenders out there might be interested in. VSIP stands for V isual S tudio I ndustry P artner. It...

As many of you must have observed that you can associate a custom tool with a project item using CustomTool property in properties window. So the question is how do you accomplish this, without any user interaction, for project items added via ...

Visual Studio 2005 SDK V3 is released! It is available for download on the VSIP member site . Did I tell you that now you can also download it directly from MSDN ? Below are some new features included in this release: DSL Tools V1 RTM...

The Editor Factory implementations, in MPF based VS SDK editor sample and wizard generated code, improperly construct the ServiceProvider members. This causes calls to GetService to give back unexpected results. For e.g if you ask for SVsFrameWindow service...

The April v2 RTM is the next milestone in the VS 2005 SDK. This RTM release contains updated VS Integration sample and documentation content, including updates to the IronPython end-end integration sample with Winform designer integration, updated C#...

How is it going guys?? Well yet another simple question came my way recently. It was about how do you control what appears in the tool window tab name when it is tabbed to other tool windows. The Solution Explorer tool window , for example, shows long...

Wish you all VS extenders a belated Merry Christmas. As usual I am a little late and my apologies for that. I hope you had a merry Christmas and a great time with your family and friends. I had a great time too. However, I will remember this season for...

Q. How to get notifications in editor when the file is modified outside of the editor? A. You ask why care about it. Well if you care about being notified when the file changed on disk outside of Visual Studio. This gives you the opportunity to...

Hi, Firs of let me tell what I have been upto lately. I am heads down working on the cool new Visual SDK 2005. I am pretty sure you folks have downloaded it and found it useful. Believe me it only gets better. Now that we are very close to Release...

Believe me I and many others have had a tough time figuring out how to consume and extend Visual Studio’s Fonts and Color options. It is one of those important features that has no to very little documentation in VSIP 2003. Let’s take a look at how easily...

(This article applies strictly to Visual Studio 2005) Project Upgrade Architecture The project systems can either choose to support upgrade or not support it at all. If the project system chooses to support upgrade then the project system implementation...

This question was recently posted on the microsoft.public.vstudio.extensibility newsgroup by our good friend Mark Conway over at Micro Focus. After a bit of source code diving and investigation by our support staff, the doctor decided this might make...

First of all, the doctor apologizes if he has misdirected some of you with his earlier post on this topic. I realized that there were major discrepancies in the approach that I had recommended. I have removed the earlier post since and am reposting the...

Did you watch the Australian Open Final? It was a great game. At the beginning I thought Hewitt had it all figured out. With Safin not able to capitalize on his fast and impeccable services, I was putting my money on Hewitt (figuratively speaking). I...

One of the most important considerations to increase the performance of Visual Studio .NET is to delay the loading of VSPackages. Loading a VSPackage DLL is expensive from a file I/O point of view, adding extra memory pressure to the working set, and...

Wow! That was a pretty long vacation for the good doctor. I know that most of you have been aching to hear from me. Anyway I missed you all a lot and am glad to be back. Hope you and your family had nice Halloween! It was nice for us. I don't know about...

The doctor is back in the house after taking some well needed rest. Back to your Visual Studio Extensibility questions! How do I open a document in a specific editor from a ToolWindow? I tried IVsUIShellOpenDocument::OpenSpecificEditor(...) but had some...