Let a "Breakpoints" window (by default opened by Debug>Windows>Breakpoints [ctrl+B, D]) serve as an example. Basically I select few breakpoints in it and I would like to know in my add-in which elements in this window are selected. I am aware that I can get collection of breakpoints in project but I would like to know what elements are selected in "Breakpoints" window.
"Is it possible to get selected items in window or even access its content at all?"
Also I am not sure whenever or not should I post a separate question for this but is there actually a way to capture user activity in IDE like for example capturing an event when user sets (adds) a breakpoint?
Originally I also asked if is it possible to achieve certain things in Visual Studio Express Edition. But this part is irrevelant.
Conclusion:
(after reading jessehouwing's answer)
I guess it is not possible using an Add-ins. Use VSPackages isntead. Also Add-ins are deprecated as of Visual Studio 2013 version.
As mentioned in my comments, what you're trying to accomplish is explicitly prohibited in the Visual Studio Express edition and is a violation of it's license. To extend the product, you need to have at least Visual Studio Professional Edition. many of the extensibility points will actively refuse any communication with 3rd party add-ins.
Almost all the things you're asking are possible using Visual Studio Extensibility once you've installed the professional edition. Products like OzCode show that almost everything is possible. Remember that most features inside visual studio are themselves extensions of the product.
Your question, indeed a whole list of questions, is indeed not the way to ask something on StackOverflow. I can give you some pointers to the documentation, which you've probably already found, and maybe to some open source products that themselves extend parts of Visual Studio that can serve as examples, but from there you'll have to piece something together until you're able to ask more specific questions.
Events you can subscribe to, the breakpoints are a CommandEvents I suspect.
Manipulating windows inside Visual Studio
Projects that extend the debugger that might serve as an example:
PyTools (debugger for Python inside Visual Studio)
Node.js tools for Visual studio (extending the Immediate Window)
But there is no easy answer to your question that fits inside this window. I'd suggest you use a tool like Reflector to look at how Microsoft accomplishes certain things (most of Visual Studio Extensibility is written in .NET anyways) and to look at open source projects that extend visual studio behavior. There are quite a few out there on Codeplex.
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to accomplish and how it's different from the Breakpoints features inside Visual Studio Professional and up.
I suggest you ask your question in the Visual Studio Extensibility forums over on MSDN, which is in a collaborative forum format, instead of a Q&A format, allowing people to answer your question bit by bit.
I'm currently writing a tool to help maintain unit and integration tests (coded tests). I've started extending Visual Studio to make the developer experience nicer, which got me to notice the new-ish CodeLens feature.
The stuff I'm currently showing as a tooltip should probably actually be part of the CodeLens info.
Question: Does anyone know how to extend CodeLens in Visual Studio?
Thanks.
As #RichardBanks says, officially CodeLens is not extensible. Technically I think it may be possible at the moment. Look for *CodeSense*.dll in the visual studio directory for hints. There is no documentation at present and the API can still change going forward.
I suggest you'd venture into this for research purpose only, distributing any 'plugin' seems like a very bad idea until Microsoft opens up the API, which they probably will.
CodeLens is officially extensible since Visual Studio 2019 was released.
CodeLens for Everyone
CodeLens has been a feature found only in Visual Studio Enterprise, but that will change in an upcoming preview of Visual Studio 2019, when it will also be available for the Community edition, likely in 2019. CodeLens shows the number of references a type or method has, information about unit tests covering the method, and data directly from Application Insights.
In addition, Microsoft has made CodeLens fully extensible1, so third-party extensions can start to add their own experiences on top of it. CodeLens makes key information about your types easy to find, while keeping you in the source code. Lenses for source control history and IntelliTrace are still an Enterprise-only feature.
Looks like this is the best place to start looking at when implementing your own CodeLens extension.
1. Highlight mine.
Code Lens is not currently extensible.
I can't say for sure, but I think there are still some features the team wants to add before they open it up for extension (e.g. git support).
In Visual Studio is there an automatic way to search over file(s) and find all classes/properties/methods that aren't referenced. Essentially abandoned code.
I don't want to manually have to right click on each and select "Find All References"
This is not a feature of Visual Studio in the current version. Using Roslyn you could code and Inspector yourself, but Roslyn doesn't offer one out of the box either at the moment. The walk-through on Semantic analysis should get you started. The roslyn forum is a good place to seek help or find examples, and there's a well monitored tag on StackOverflow as well of course.
Productivity plugins like Resharper and Code Rush offer this for sure. There are other similar tools that might have this feature JustCode, VisualAssist, CodeItRight are likely candidates.
You can also use something like Visual NDepend to detect unused methods. Their new command Linq to Code features should make it relatively easy to build a commandline tool that fishes out all unused calls.
A bit late but if you install SSDT (Sql Server Data Tools) this also add grayed reference count to each method in visual studio.
Note: This is actually "code lens" which is no longer available for VS2015. Installing the SSDT is the way you can have "code lens" in VS2015.
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Closed 10 years ago.
What are in your opinion the "must have" Visual Studio 2010 extensions?
OData Protocol Visualizer is fine
Solid Softfare Xplorer isn't free, but looks very nice
Just tried NuGet Tools and it's GREAT
Resharper 5.0 is the one I must have. Some others are nice to have as well.
I like the Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools.
Mine are
PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010 offer so much...
Triple Click - Select line with Triple Click
StructureAdornment - Show scope of code
Go To Definition And Them Editor - As mentioned by Noah
Matt's Visual Studio Color Theme Editor is proving to be really popular (over 10,000 downloads as of 4/18/10).
I've written a couple that are popular; Go To Definition is one of the most popular. If you do a search for my name ("Noah Richards"), you'll find some of the others (triple click to select whole lines, italicize comments, spell checking for strings and comments, and about 7 others).
There's at least one other spell check extension on the gallery, the HTML Spell Checker. It's more mature than the one I wrote but requires Office to work.
I love the Win7 Taskbar Extension, especiall when working with multiple solutions.
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/0c92dd87-50ac-489e-882b-b99de7624502
I have found the snippets to be useful for various tasks along the way, and so this is a good way to smooth out the maintenance of such snippets:
Snippet Designer
Description Adapted from the website:
A Snippet editor integrated inside of the IDE.
Opening any .snippet file
Uses the native Visual Studio code editor
Mark replacements with a convenient right click menu.
Snippet properties inside the Visual Studio properties window.
A Snippet Explorer tool
A right Click "Export as Snippet" menu option added to C#, VB and XML code editor to send highlighted code directly to the Snippet Editor
When using SVN
Visual SVN
saves a lot of time and it is very handy.
Can I put a plug in for my own extension? :)
PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension - Add PowerShell support to VS2010
I use these extensions:
Productivity Power Tools
Autoscroller
The first one has a lot of options, just enable the options you like. I liked the 'close selected tab' icon on the right corner in Visual studio 2008. You can enable that icon again with this extension. I also like the option to 'pin' tabs.
The autoscroller enables the scrolling in the main window, its also called 'middle-click scrolling'. I missed taht from VS 2008 as well.
Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is a must have for WPF developers.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=eff8a0da-0a4d-48e8-8366-6ddf2ecad801&displaylang=en
Refactor is a must-have for me. CodeRush is also nice, though one of these years I need to seriously compare it to Resharper. I think most people stick with whichever they first use, as they both take a lot of time to learn.
http://www.devexpress.com/Downloads/Visual_Studio_Add-in/
Update
As pointed out below by Jonathan Allen, this functionality already exists in Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools. Adding this extension, then, would be redundant if you already have that.
There are many ways to solve the posting of formatted code, but I liked the integrated nature of this extension and how you can tweak the resulting HTML:
Code4Blog
Description From Linked Page:
Code4Blog is a Visual Studio 2010 extension that allows to convert any code supported by Visual Studio IDE to HTML format with the same structure and colors. Main purpose of this extension is to prepare a code snippet to be published in rich documents, for example in blog posts, Microsoft Word documents or Help files. Some additional styling could be applied: max width and height of the code block, custom background (per code line), font family and font size, line numbering and others.
I'm using Visual Nunit which is rather nice if you don't have the money to stump up for something like ReSharper. It's only feature (as far as I'm aware) is to allow running nunit tests from within the IDE, which is nice becuase it means you don't have to revert to Nunit GUI every time you want to run some of your unit tests. Also seems pretty stable as of version 1.1.7.
I find the following useful
If you use TFS for ALM Management
Search Work Items for TFS 2010
VS10x Code Map is great for visually navigating classes
SpecFlow for mapping User Stories/Features to automated tests in a way that is readable by steak holders or team members without coding knowledge (Behaviour Driven Development)
And a Spell Checker for strings/comments is always good
I'm also going to plug my own extension - VSFileNav used for quickly finding a file in your solution using wildcards, camel case searches etc.
I developed it because there wasn't anything free (and good - SonicFileFinder was too slow) and used it many times every day.
I am working on a C# windows based project in visual studio 2005.I often debug different features in this huge project.Now the problem is i have made few break points in few places which i require only when i debug for that feature.i want other break points to be disabled then.I understand this might not be a use case for larger community.
What i want to know is,is there any way to group break points in VS 2005 ,so that i can enable disable them when i debug that particular feature?
There's not a feature built into Visual Studio, however something I came across a while back is a clever use of macros to give some grouping functionality.
Check out this blog entry by Jim Gries showing how to do it.
Just a note, I now it doesn't help your current situation, but the situation has been improved in VS 2010.
you can check this reference:
a VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (BreakPoints, DataTips, Import/Export)
This solution works only in Visual Studio 2010 and above