Pedro Silva's Blog

Cool Extension: Modeling Feature Pack

Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:28:42 GMT

Microsoft just recently released the Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. This provides additional great features for visualizing your code, seeing its interconnections, and doing something about it. The base UML diagramming functionality shipped as part of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. This feature pack adds more functionality to those diagrams by being able to:

Generate code from UML class diagrams.
Create UML class diagrams from code.
Import UML class, sequence, and use case elements from XMI 2.1 files.
Create and view links from work items to model elements.
Generate dependency graphs for ASP.NET Web, C, and C++ projects.
Create and validate layer diagrams for C and C++ code.
Write custom code to create, modify, and validate layer diagrams.

These are all great features to see being added to the UML functionality. I hope all you modelers out there pick up this pack and try it out.

Note: You need to have Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate to use this feature pack.

Cool Extension: VS2010 Pro Power Tools

Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:43:31 GMT

We've just released the new Pro Power Tools which is a collection of useful extensions to make your day-to-day use of Visual Studio 2010 even more productive. Highlights in this release:

Collection of useful editor extensions
New and improved Add Reference dialog
Document Tab Well, with colors and pinning of tabs
Extension update checker that runs on startup of VS

Also, this is the first release of the Power Pack, but expect updates to come out regularly with improvements to the current extensions and new extensions that are just as useful...

Extension Manager Feedback

Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:57:39 GMT

Now that Visual Studio 2010 is available, it would be great to get more feedback on the new Extension Manager feature in this version. This can encompass a lot of things from the installation experience, to the online extension discovery, to the installed extensions and updates, VSIX and MSI support, and more... and anything else you'd like to comment on. If you haven't tried the Extension Manager yet, you can find it in the Tools menu. Launch it, and start discovering extensions to Visual Studio by clicking its Online Gallery tab.

What parts of the Extension Manager do you really like?
What parts would you like to see improved?
Also, with an eye looking ahead, what are some of the things you would really like to see in the next version of the Extension Manager?

Feel free to comment on this post with your thoughts, feedback, or ideas. Thanks.

Nice Review of the Extension Manager

Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:14:03 GMT

Chris wrote a nice review of the VS2010 Extension Manager feature at TechRepublic. Having worked on the team that wrote that feature, it's always nice to see a positive review of what you've spent your effort working on. As Chris also noted, there is still more work that needs to be done to round out the Extension Manager experience. But, we hope that its first incarnation will fuel the use and development of new extensions for Visual Studio. We've already seen a lot of new extensions go live right around launch of VS2010.

One thing I'd like to make clear from his article, Chris talks a lot about MEF extensions and the Extension Manager... and there are definitely some interesting, new MEF extensions that have already been build for VS2010. But, the bulk of the extensions on the Online Gallery are packages (for designers, tool windows, menu commands, etc), toolbox controls, and templates, which are not MEF based at all. The new deployment model we implemented for this version (the VSIX file), supports all of those methods of extending Visual Studio... not only for MEF extensions.

As a matter of fact, your extension doesn't even need to be deployed in a VSIX file to show up in the Online Gallery. The Extension Manager will also show MSI-based extensions that can be installed from the VS Gallery. However, those types of extensions cannot be managed (enabled/disabled/uninstalled) through the Extension Manager... that must be done with the Windows Add/Remove Programs.

Cool Extension: Extension Analyzer

Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] — Thu, 27 May 2010 22:25:17 GMT

Have you ever created a VS Package, tried to run it in Visual Studio only to get the infamous Package Load Failure dialog? Created an editor extension, tried to use it and it never shows up in the VS2010 code editor? Well then the Extension Analyzer is for you.

This tool lets you view logging data from the Visual Studio ActivityLog and MEF tracing, so that you can see errors as they're happening in your component's load. It also lets you run fusion analysis against your assembly to see what kind of managed load failures may be coming from there. It shows what MEF queries Visual Studio makes as different subsystems in the product are being executed. And, even more.

Give it a try and provide any feedback you have on this tool, in it's VS Gallery page.

Creating Custom StartPage Extensions

Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:50:00 GMT

I've been working on a custom start page sample that creates a new tab on the typical Visual Studio StartPage. This new tab integrates in Bing search functionality, letting developers type in their search query and performing a search. The results can either come up in the Visual Studio internal browser or the user's default browser (depending on a user setting). Along with the search ability, the page also shows the Bing image of the day, so that you can enjoy those scenic images in your favorite IDE. So, if you'd like to see this custom start page in action, you can install it from the VS Gallery.

I created this custom StartPage using the Custom Start Page Project Template available on the VS Gallery. This project template lets you quickly set up a start page that is similar in functionality as the Start Page that ships with Visual Studio, along with a new tab for the custom content that you want to add. This allows you to create start pages that fit in well with the VS user interface. But, the start page is all XAML, so you can custom or completely rewrite the start page to look exactly how you wish.

This topic on MSDN gives a good step-by-step process on how to use the Custom Start Page Template.

Along the way while working on this custom start page, I ran across some interesting topics (a couple that I previously blogged about and a good MSDN article):

Overall, using the template makes it really easy to create a full featured start page, and let's you concentrate on implementing the custom functionality you want to surface and not on the infrastructure to get a start page up and running. And, then your just developing a custom WPF control with XAML and code-behind, so it really straightforward. Also, the template automatically builds a .VSIX file for you. This is the new extension deployment framework in Visual Studio 2010, so you can take this .VSIX file and directly upload to the VS Gallery to share you custom start page with the world.

The one drawback of the custom start page deployment is that the new page doesn't automatically get set as your page. You need to go set it yourself. The following steps describe how to switch from the default Start Page to the Bing Start Page.

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.

2. On the left side of the Options dialog box, expand the Environment node, and then click Startup.

3. In the Customize Start Page list, select ‘[Installed Extension] Bing Start Page’

4. Click OK.

Cool Extension: Power Commands for VS 2010

Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:21:00 GMT

For all of you fans of the Power Commands extension, Lance, from our team, just updated this extension and posted it up on the VS Gallery. This topic contains a full list of all of the new commands that are part of this extension. But, the most interesting ones are:

Collapse projects
Open command prompt
Remove and Sort Usings (recursively)
Transform templates

Install this extension, and try out some of the other cool commands. You can get this either from the VS Gallery or within Visual Studio 2010 in the Extension Manager (Tools > Extension Manager).

How To: Launch a URL in the Visual Studio Internal Browser

Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:32:00 GMT

For the sample extension that I'm working on, I wanted to have the ability to launch a URL in Visual Studio. This is useful for a more integrated experience in the IDE, but of course, some people may prefer to use their default web browser instead. So, I created a method that will either launch the internal or default web browser depending on a user setting (that way users can change to it to match their desired behavior).

For the internal browser, we use the IVsWebBrowsingService.Navigate method. By passing 0 to the dwNavigateFlags, the browsing service reuses an internal browser window if one already exists, or creates a new one if it does not. For the default browser, we call the Process.Start method with the appropriate flags so that it will behave like the managed equivalent of ShellExecute on the URL. Here's the code I wrote for this:

        private const string verbOpen = "Open";
        private IVsWebBrowsingService browserService = null;

        /// <summary>
        /// Get the IVsWebBrowserService to use for navigating to the internal browser.
        /// </summary>
        private IVsWebBrowsingService BrowserService
        {
            get
            {
                if (browserService == null)
                {
                    // if we don't already have the internal browser service, get it from the global service provider.
                    browserService = ServiceProvider.GetService(typeof(SVsWebBrowsingService)) as IVsWebBrowsingService;
                }


                return browserService;
            }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the initialized instance of ProcessStartInfo for a ShellExecute Open command.
        /// </summary>
        public ProcessStartInfo StartInfo
        {
            get
            {
                if (startInfo == null)
                {
                    startInfo = new ProcessStartInfo();
                    startInfo.UseShellExecute = true;
                    startInfo.Verb = verbOpen;
                }
 
                return startInfo;
            }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Launches the specified Url either in the internal VS browser or the
        /// user's default web browser.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="browserService">VS's browser service for interacting with the internal browser.</param>
        /// <param name="launchUrl">Url to launch.</param>
        /// <param name="useInternalBrowser">true to use the internal browser; false to use the default browser.</param>
        private void LaunchWebBrowser(IVsWebBrowsingService browserService, string launchUrl, bool useInternalBrowser)
        {
            try
            {
                if (useInternalBrowser == true)
                {
                    // if set to use internal browser, then navigate via the browser service.
                    IVsWindowFrame ppFrame;

                    // passing 0 to the NavigateFlags allows the browser service to reuse open instances
                    // of the internal browser.
                    browserService.Navigate(launchUrl, 0, out ppFrame);
                }
                else
                {
                    // if not, launch the user's default browser by starting a new one.
                    StartInfo.FileName = launchUrl;
                    Process.Start(StartInfo);
                }
            }
            catch
            {
                // if the process could not be started, show an error.
                MessageBox.Show("Cannot launch this url.", "Extension Error", MessageBoxButton.OK, MessageBoxImage.Error);
            }
        }

The code above gets the IVsWebBrowsingService by querying a service provider. You can get a service provider in your extension by various methods: for typical extension look in this MSDN article; or if doing it from a StartPage, read my previous article on that subject.

Note: If you look at the IVsWebBrowsingService interface, you will notice it defines a CreateExternalWebBrowser method. I first thought I would use this method, since it was defined on this service. However, when I tried to call it, this method returned E_NOTIMPL. It appears this implementation has been removed, but calling ShellExecute on a URL is easy enough to do.

How To: Get a ServiceProvider from the VS Start Page

Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:16:00 GMT

When working with Visual Studio extensibility, getting a ServiceProvider is the main way to find and use services that are available in Visual Studio. The new VS Start Page is written in WPF and getting to a ServiceProvider from within the page or one of its child controls is not easily found. There is a fairly good topic on this in MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff432842(v=VS.100).aspx, though the nugget about getting to the ServiceProvider is a little lost in the full article. So, I decided to pull it out into a post here to make it easier to find this useful snippet.

First, use the Custom StartPage template to create a new project to work with (this topic explains how to use that template).

Then, in the code file for your UserControl, you can add the following code as a property of the control class:

private DTE2 dte = null;

private IServiceProvider serviceProvider = null;

/// <summary>

/// Gets the StartPage's DTE object from its DataContext.

/// </summary>

private DTE2 DTE

{

get

{

if (dte == null)

{

// if we don't already have the ServiceProvider, get it from the page's DataContext.

ICustomTypeDescriptor typeDescriptor = DataContext as ICustomTypeDescriptor;

PropertyDescriptorCollection propertyCollection = typeDescriptor.GetProperties();

// first get the DTE object from the DataContext.

dte = propertyCollection.Find("DTE", false).GetValue(DataContext) as DTE2;

}

return dte;

}

/// <summary>

/// Gets the StartPage's ServiceProvider for use in our custom control.

/// </summary>

private IServiceProvider ServiceProvider

{

get

{

if (serviceProvider == null)

{

// get and then cast the DTE object to a ServiceProvider.

serviceProvider = new ServiceProvider((Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop.IServiceProvider)DTE);

}

return serviceProvider;

}

Note: this code requires you to include the following namespaces in your source file: EnvDTE80, Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell, Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop, and System.ComponentModel.

Now that you have this method to get at the ServiceProvider from your custom StartPage, you can use it to get any of the services provided by Visual Studio and integrate them into your page.

Cool Extension: Custom Start Page Template

Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:51:00 GMT

For those that have seen Visual Studio 2010, there is a fancy new start page that is much more functional and integrated with the product. Part of this new Start Page infrastructure is the ability to replace the one from the product with a custom page. And, this extension gives you the tools to start creating and sharing your own custom Start Pages.

I was just trying out the Custom Start Page template that Greg from our team posted up on the Visual Studio Gallery. So far, so good... I was able to create a new start page that looks similar to the one in Visual Studio but added a small bit of functionality (an additional tab). The template is fairly self-explanatory and has a good F5 experience for building and debugging the custom Start Page in an experimental instance of VS. Also, the project builds into a VSIX file that can be uploaded to the VS Gallery to easily share with others.

I'll post my start page changes when I get it wrapped up a little more.