Professional Visual Studio® 2008

51.4. A Quick Overview of DTE

Now that you have a background about the automation model and its code representation, Development Tools Extensibility (DTE), let's look at some general information about the DTE and its main parts. In general, DTE covers some main aspects of Visual Studio including solutions and projects, documents and windows, code files, commands, debuggers, and events.

Some other things in the IDE can be accessed by the DTE, but the items just mentioned are the ones you usually care about. As you can see, there's an association between the main aspects of the DTE and the main models in the automation model; in fact each of these parts represents one of these models.

Even though we can't talk about all these parts in this book, this section gives a quick overview of some basic parts, including solutions, commands, and events.

To explain the concepts in the next few subheadings, I'll use some code snippets that are actually macros. You'll get familiar with macros in Chapter 53. For now, just focus on the source code and general idea behind examples.

51.4.1. Solutions and Projects

As a part of DTE you can work with solutions, projects, and project items in your code and get access to their properties and methods easily. Not only can you find information like the names of items and their counts, but you can also use methods to dynamically perform the same actions you do manually in the IDE, such as adding new projects to a solution or removing a project item from ...