Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Unleashed, Third Edition

Defining and Reacting to Commands

One of the primary ways you interact with a package-based extension is by issuing it a command (perhaps via a Visual Studio menu, or a toolbar button press event). A command, in the VSPackage environment, is nothing more than a message to the extension that triggers an action. For example, if we have an extension that computed the total lines of executable code within a code editor window, we would probably trigger that computation via a command. Or, if our extension was capable of printing out a file loaded into Visual Studio, we would initiate the printing via a print command.

Listing 15.2 shows the command file code that was generated with our "Hello, World" custom command project.

LISTING 15.2 Command Class ...