Visual Studio Hacks

Automate Visual Studio #86

Chapter 12, Extending Visual Studio

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HACK

remember that these operations could be performed by anything operating

against the object model.

Using the macro recording functionality of Visual Studio

[Hack #51] can be a great way to discover how to do some-

thing through the DTE (Development Tools Extensibility)

object. It isn’t always perfect, but it is sometimes easier than

trying to find the answer in the documentation.

MSDN includes a great reference to this object model. You can access the

MSDN documentation through Help

➝ Contents ➝ Visual Studio .NET ➝

Developing with Visual Studio ➝ Reference ➝ Automation and Extensibility

Reference or from MSDN Online at the following URL:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsintro7/

html/vxoriExtensibilityReference.asp

The automation object model chart is particularly useful since it shows a

visual hyperlinked representation of the entire object model, and you can

drill down into the documentation for each class.

At the top of the object model is the DTE object. This object contains all of

the classes and collections that you will be working with to automate Visual

Studio. This is the object that your macro or add-in will reference and use.

Automate Documents

Possibly the most frequently used object in the DTE is the Document object.

Using the Document object, you can work with and manipulate any of