Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Command Objects

Every action that is possible to execute through the menus and toolbars in Visual Studio is generically referred to as a command. For example, pasting text into a window is a command, as are building a project, toggling a breakpoint, and closing a window.

For each command supported in the IDE, there is a corresponding Command object; the DTE.Commands collection holds all the valid Command object instances. Each command is keyed by a name that categorizes, describes, and uniquely identifies the command. The “paste” command, for instance, is available via the string key “Edit.Paste”. If you want to retrieve the Command object mapping to the paste command, you pull from the Commands collection using that string key:

Dim commands ...