Visual Studio Hacks

Add an External Tool #33

Chapter 4, Customizing Visual Studio

|

131

HACK

Using these variables, you can pass all kinds of information directly to your

external tool, saving you the time of supplying this information by hand.

You can also set the initial directory where this tool should be run. This is

set using the Initial Directory option. The initial directory can be set to Item

Directory, Target Directory, Target Name, Project Directory, or Solution

Directory. (These arguments are the same as the arguments defined in

Table 4-1.)

External Tool Options

A number of options can also be set when configuring external tools:

Use Output Window

When this option is enabled, any response from the command line will

be shown in the output window. If you were calling a command-line

utility that reported statistics on your assembly, instead of having to

view the results in the open command prompt, you could have those

results shown in the output window. “Follow the Rules with FxCop”

[Hack #65] includes an example of doing this with the FxCop command-

line utility.

Prompt for Arguments

When this option is enabled, you will be prompted every time the tool is

run and allowed to modify or change the arguments being passed to the

external tool. A good example of when this might be useful is when you

have a tool to which you want to pass the project, solution, or item

path, depending on the circumstances. By prompting