vs2010 Extensibility Tips and Tricks [closed] - visual-studio-2010

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Closed 11 years ago.
Diving into vs2010 Extensibility and I gotta say the subject seems to be as wide as it is deep. Anyone have tips, tricks or hacks to leverage jumping into this somewhat intimidatingly huge niche of visual studio?

I wrote 9 hours of Visual Studio Extensibility material for Pluralsight (part 1, part 2). If you're an MSDN subscriber you can get a one-month free subscription which should give you more than enough time to get through both courses. I also put together some 2008 and 2010 talks on VSX topics and both the slides and demos (along with videos) are on Code Project.

I'll be first then....
Saving the following text as a registry and appending it(open it with regedit) allows for easier identifying of a particular menu item or command and allows you to build on existing but hard to find UI elements...
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\General]
"EnableVSIPLogging"=dword:00000001
I found this useful tidbit here
With this you can add Context Menus into you vs2010 IDE (New version is using MEF to some extent but there are older versions just using MAF). So much easier then MAF!!!
VSPackage Builder: Yet another awesome way to design Visual Studio Packages without having to rummage through the innards of a vs extension to design one.

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F# visual studio environment support [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
I developing a small project with F# on Visual Studio 2012. I'm used to C# development, and it seems to me that C# has a far far (far) better support in the environment than F#, and even better support when adding resharper.
Are there any plugins that can improve that?
I would love snippets, better templates, code folding, refactoring, etc...
Is there is an open source project trying to achieve this?
As mentioned in the comments, there are fewer advanced code editing tools for F# than for C#. This is one thing where the F# community is quite active, so it is good idea to follow the mailing list and fsharp.org web site.
One less widely known thing is that the standard tooling includes (not very tested) support for collapsing of code blocks and navigation bar that can be turned on.

Installation tools for windows deployment [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
Depends on your experience what are best free installation tools available for windows deployment for both managed and unmanaged deployment ?
Visual studio setup project only works for simple deployment scenario's and it doesnt allow too much customization.
WiX is your best bet if you want to build MSI packages. It can be customized to various degrees, from simple modifications to the dialogs to full control over every step of the setup process, it integrates fully with Visual Studio, and it's free and open source.
Be wary that, although the documentation is good and the learning curve (in my opinion) is pretty fast for simple projects, full-fledged personalization requires a moderate to deep understanding of the inner workings of Windows Installer. The excellent WiX Tutorial should, however, give you an idea of the possibilities offered by this tool (as well as sample code) without going into too much detail. (Of course, if you want to have an extremely fine-grade control over the setup program, you'll have to resort to MSDN in the end).
Another bonus is that the latest version of WiX offers an integrated bootstrapper as well, so, if you need - for example - to install or upgrade the .NET Framework on the user's machine, you can do it using this single tool (minimal examples are provided in the WiX documentation).
Please have a look at
InnoSetup

Any cheap or free IDE's out there for VB6 programming? [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
Any cheap or free IDE's out there for VB6 programming? or is MS the only way to go?
Thanks.
VB6 is a Microsoft language and product, so they have the VB6 thing sewed up.
If you need the VB6 compiler, there's no alternative to the real Microsoft product. You can run it in command-line mode so I guess you could use any IDE.
If you have an MSDN subscription, you can download Visual Basic 6 free.
Otherwise try somewhere like eBay, although it's often surprisingly expensive. Although Microsoft said in September 09 there were still several million people using VB6, so maybe it's not that surprising.
Not that I know of for VB6.
VB .NET has Visual Basic Express Edition, though...
I don't know of a complete IDE, but MZ-Tools makes a great IDE addin for VBA/VB6 (and it's free).
Have you tried ebay? You may be able to pick up a genuine copy of VB6 for not a lot of money.
Not for VB6 (another answer mentions a .NET solution).
There used to be a Visual Basic 5 Control Creation Edition (CCE) that was freely redistributable, but my feeble attempts at searching have failed to find it; a non-Microsoft site purporting to have it has removed it and replaced it with a text file complaining of link abuse, and Microsoft themselves don't distribute it anymore, sadly.
The CCE can't be used to make executables, as hinted at by its name.

Resources for building a Visual Studio plug-in? [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
I'd like to build a pretty simple plug-in for Visual Studio, but I don't really know how this has to be done. Is this doable in (non-managed) C++?
I'd like to know what resources you'd recommend me.
DevExpress has a free plug-in called DXCore which provides some nice abstractions upon which to then build other plug-ins...you might look into that.
Do you really want to do it in unmanaged code? DevExpress has a nice free library to develop visual studio plugins but it's managed. This is what they use to develop Refactor and coderush
http://www.devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/DXCore/
It seems the underlying API is kind of messy. As far as I know this is the easiest way.
I've never tried, so I don't know about doing it in C++, but this website has loads of information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsx/default.aspx
A good place to start would be this tutorial:
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/mgold/AddIns11292005015631AM/AddIns.aspx
The DXCore from DevExpress is a wonderful library for basing all sorts of plugins. Feel free to drop by the IDE Tools Forums and more specifically the DXCore plugin forum and ask for any help you might need. :)
I'm not so sure about unmanaged C++ but I know for certain that the DXCore supports Plugin creation in any managed language.
Found this MSDN tutorial: Creating Add-ins Using Visual C++. Thanks Matt.

Tool in Visual Studio 2008 for helping with Localization [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
Does anyone have any recommendations of tools that can be of assistance with moving literal values into resource files for localization?
I've used a resharper plugin called RGreatX but was wondering if there is anything else out there.
It's one heck of a long manual process for moving the strings across and think there must be a better way! RGreatX is OK but could be a bit slicker I feel.
Here's one:
http://www.codeplex.com/ResourceRefactoring
It'a actually a Microsoft "open source" Visual Studio(2005 and up) tool that integrates with the IDE. You can easily replace every occurence of a string with a ressource reference with a few clicks.
You may find Zeta Resource Editor useful too.
ReSharper itself (5.0+) now has support for localization which includes moving strings to resource files and highlighting localizabile strings.
Try Visual Localizer - you can batch-process whole code, select which strings may be localized and the tool will add them to a resource file and create a reference instead. Many other features easing localization are included.

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