Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

The DTE/DTE2 Root Object

The DTE/DTE2 object represents the tip of the API tree. You can think of it as representing Visual Studio itself, with the objects under it mapping to the various constituent parts of the IDE.

As mentioned previously, DTE2 is the most current version of this object, with DTE providing compatibility with previous versions. In this chapter, unless we specifically need to differentiate between their capabilities, we generically refer to the DTE and DTE2 objects as simply DTE.

The DTE properties are used to gain a reference to a specific IDE object (or collection of objects). Methods on the object are used to execute commands in the IDE, launch wizards, or close the IDE.

Table 13.2 shows the major properties and methods defined ...