TEAMFLY Team-Fly ® Jeffrey Cogswell Developing Visual Studio ® .NET Macros and Add-Ins Dear Valued Customer, We realize you’re a busy professional with deadlines to hit. Whether your goal is to learn a new technology or solve a critical problem, we want to be there to lend you a hand. Our primary objective is to provide you with the insight and knowledge you need to stay atop the highly competitive and ever- changing technology industry. Wiley Publishing, Inc., offers books on a wide variety of technical categories, including security, data warehousing, software development tools, and networking — everything you need to reach your peak. 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Swadley Vice President & Executive Group Publisher Wiley Technology Publishing WILEY advantage The Developing Visual Studio ® .NET Macros and Add-Ins Jeffrey Cogswell Developing Visual Studio ® .NET Macros and Add-Ins Publisher: Joe Wikert Senior Editor: Ben Ryan Developmental Editor: Adaobi Obi Tulton Editorial Manager: Kathryn Malm Production Editors: Micheline Frederick/Felicia Robinson Media Development Specialist: Megan Decraene Text Design & Composition: Wiley Composition Services This book is printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Copyright © 2003 by Jeff Cogswell. All rights reserved. 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Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley Publishing logo, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of Wiley Publishing, Inc., in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. Visual Studio is a trademark or registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All other trade- marks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: ISBN: 0-471-23752-3 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To all the .NET programmers who are continually seeking knowledge. [...]... about Macros and Add-ins What Are Macros and Add-ins? Why Use Macros and Add-ins? Automating Your Work with Macros Enhancing the IDE with Add-ins Online Help for Macros and Add-ins Other Ways to Customize Visual Studio NET 3 4 4 5 7 8 9 Manipulating the Windows Managing the Toolbars and Commands Customizing the Menus 10 17 22 Moving Forward Chapter 2 26 Just Enough VB.NET VB.NET Subroutines and Functions... Team-Fly® Introduction Welcome to Macros and Add-ins This is a book about developing macros and add-ins for Visual Studio NET Every programmer who uses Visual Studio NET, regardless of the type of project he or she is developing, and regardless of his or her skill level, sooner or later wonders: Why can’t Visual Studio NET do such -and- such? Or: Wouldn’t it be nice if Visual Studio NET had this feature I’m... issues relating to macros, add-ins, and NET development in general ■ ■ Links to more add-ins and macros that you can download ■ ■ And much more The Web site was designed to help you, the software developer, get the most possible out of Visual Studio NET as you develop add-ins and macros Please join us! xxi PA R T One Automating Your Work CHAPTER 1 All about Macros and Add-ins Macros and add-ins are nothing... 2: Enhancing Visual Studio Here I introduce the concepts and technology behind add-ins and then take you through the whole world of add-in development Part 3: VS.NET and Other Products In this part I describe how you can use Visual Studio NET to write add-ins for Microsoft Office, and how you can integrate Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel, and Outlook directly into Visual Studio NET There... macros, you can use a simple recorder feature Most of the Microsoft products (including Visual Studio NET) allow you to easily record a sequence of keystrokes and menu commands to a macro, and then play it back later But if you want to write more sophisticated macros, you can open up the Visual Studios Macro IDE and develop macros using a full-featured IDE that looks much like the standard Visual Studio. .. creating an add-in starting in Chapter 6, “Creating Add-ins for the IDE.”) Online Help for Macros and Add-ins One of the most important references you will want to use when developing your macros and add-ins is the online help that accompanies Visual Studio NET There are dozens of objects and classes available to you for manipulating the Visual Studio NET IDE, and these classes are all fully documented in... Chapter 6, “Creating Add-ins for the IDE.” Visual Studio NET contains a project wizard called Visual Studio NET Add-in Project This wizard simplifies the process of creating an add-in by providing you with a starting point Further, Visual Studio NET gives you an interesting way of developing 7 8 Chapter 1 add-ins When you run an add-in project opened in Visual Studio NET, a new Visual Studio NET process... more beyond macros If you want to add new features to the IDE, you can use add-ins You can add new dialog boxes to support your new features, and you can add property sheets to the Options dialog box Team-Fly® All about Macros and Add-ins Automating Your Work with Macros Think of macros as a way to automate Visual Studio NET With Visual Studio NET’s built-in macro language (which is really Visual Basic... Models Visual Studio Packages Visual Studio Project Types Accessing Project Types Not Supported by the Macros IDE Accessing the Project Object Accessing Visual Basic and C# Projects Accessing C++ Projects Macro IDE Automation Model Moving Forward 98 99 100 101 102 102 103 104 104 106 107 108 109 112 113 Part 2 Enhancing Visual Studio 115 Chapter 6 Introducing Add-ins About Add-ins 117 117 Startup and. .. book is in C# and VB.NET A bit of COM and ActiveX familiarity will help, too, although for the uninitiated, I explain most of what you’ll need to know of COM and ActiveX for developing add-ins (The reason you need to know a bit about these technologies is that Visual Studio NET is a COM automation server, and you’ll be developing add-ins as COM in-process servers.) Some knowledge of Visual Basic is . All about Macros and Add-ins 3 What Are Macros and Add-ins? 4 Why Use Macros and Add-ins? 4 Automating Your Work with Macros 5 Enhancing the IDE with Add-ins 7 Online Help for Macros and Add-ins. Publishing WILEY advantage The Developing Visual Studio ® .NET Macros and Add-Ins Jeffrey Cogswell Developing Visual Studio ® .NET Macros and Add-Ins Publisher: Joe Wikert Senior Editor: Ben Ryan Developmental. resources for IT professionals The book you now hold, Developing Visual Studio ® .NET Macros and Add-Ins, is your complete guide to customizing the Visual Studio development environment. With this book,