Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 6, Speed Hacks

#47 Build a Custom Tool

HACK

Write the Code

To create a custom tool, you first need to create a new project in the lan-

guage of your choice and then create a new class in that project. The next

thing you need to do is set your class to inherit from a class called

BaseCodeGeneratorWithSite.

In Visual Studio .NET 2002, this class was available in the Microsoft.

VSDesigner.dll assembly. However, starting with Visual Studio .NET 2003,

this class was made private and you could no longer inherit from it.

Thankfully, someone at Microsoft has made this class available for down-

load from GotDotNet, so before you can inherit from this class, you must

first download it from http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/

Details.aspx?SampleGuid=4AA14341-24D5-45AB-AB18-B72351D0371C.

Figure 6-3. The VSTweak Alias Manager

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The zip file downloaded from this link contains all the code for the class, but

all you really need is the BaseCodeGeneratorWithSite.dll. Reference this .dll

from your project, add the

using or Imports statement for the

CustomToolGenerator namespace, and then you can inherit from the

BaseCodeGeneratorWithSite class in your code.

After inheriting from

BaseCodeGeneratorWithSite, you will need to imple-

ment the abstract ...