How to handle Solutions, Projects and their contents in a VisualStudio extension

Question

In short: I'm new to VisualStudio Extensibility and my goal is to create an extension with a ToolWindow (which already works) showing different views for each context of a VisualStudio solution, i. e. a view for the solution, a view for a project etc.. The window should be opened by clicking on a context menu entry in the context menus of the Solution Explorer, Class View, Object Browser and (ideally) any other window showing contents like projects, namespaces, classes etc..

After searching I found a lot of information, but for some points I couldn't find very helpful information. How do I ...

• ... create a context menu item for the VisualStudio views?
• ... get the currently open solution as an instance in code?
• ... get the projects of the solution and their contens as instances in code?
• ... add/remove items to/from a solution/project/class/... in code?
• ... react to selection changes in the Solution Explorer?

What I've done, so far: I read the docs for Starting to Develop Visual Studio Extensions and downloaded the VSSDK-Extensibility-Samples. Especially the WPF_Toolwindow example was interesting for my purposes, so I built and ran it, which was successful, so far. Another interesting sample would have been the WPFDesigner_XML, but it always throws a NullReferenceException, so I decided to stick with the former ToolWindow, which is completely fine, for now.

Furtermore, I tried to understand the example by having a close look at each file in the project, running it in the debugger and analyzing what happened. I'm confident I understood it, but am also open for corrections of my possibly misguided thoughts following.

Now, I have created a new project, based on the WPF_Toolwindow sample, renamed and adapted to my needs (basically, I created new GUIDs, renamed the namespaces and removed things I won't use). This extension still works in the debugger. I even uninstalled everything from the experimental instance and debugged the extension from scratch.

What I try to achieve:

• Have the ToolWindow load a specific view/viewmodel, when the selection changes in the Solution Explorer (or any other VisualStudio view). Alternatively, there should be a context menu item for every node's context menu in the Solution Explorer tree (or any other VisualStudio view).
• Get the currently open solution, the containing projects and basically everything from the Solution Explorer's content as instances processable in my viewmodel. I need to properly add/remove
  • classes/structs/enums to/from
    1. a folder in a project
    2. a namespace
  • properties/fields to/from a class/struct
• Generate code based on information of the solution and add the file properly to a project.

Does anyone know of examples for something like this or can anyone give me some hints, where I can find further information? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

(1) The items already have a context menu and I want to add a new command to this menu.

if you want to add a sub menu to the context menu, the following link provide a complete sample

https://github.com/visualstudioextensibility/VSX-Samples/tree/master/CommandSubmenu

(3) Yes, basically adding a file to a project without manually manipulating the project file would be nice.

You can add the file to project via Project.ProjectItems.AddFromFile, and the following provide a sample for your reference.

https://www.mztools.com/Articles/2014/MZ2014009.aspx

Update:

I select a project and a similar event is fired. Are there such events I can subscribe to?

You could use IVsMonitorSelection to implement. here is the code which retrieve related project path for your reference.

IntPtr hierarchyPointer, selectionContainerPointer;
            Object selectedObject = null;
            IVsMultiItemSelect multiItemSelect;
            uint projectItemId;

            IVsMonitorSelection monitorSelection =
                    (IVsMonitorSelection)Package.GetGlobalService(
                    typeof(SVsShellMonitorSelection));

            monitorSelection.GetCurrentSelection(out hierarchyPointer,
                                                 out projectItemId,
                                                 out multiItemSelect,
                                                 out selectionContainerPointer);

            IVsHierarchy selectedHierarchy = Marshal.GetTypedObjectForIUnknown(
                                                 hierarchyPointer,
                                                 typeof(IVsHierarchy)) as IVsHierarchy;

            if (selectedHierarchy != null)
            {
                ErrorHandler.ThrowOnFailure(selectedHierarchy.GetProperty(
                                                  projectItemId,
                                                  (int)__VSHPROPID.VSHPROPID_ExtObject,
                                                  out selectedObject));
            }

            Project selectedProject = selectedObject as Project;

            string projectPath = selectedProject.FullName;

For more information about the usage, please refer to:

https://www.mztools.com/articles/2007/mz2007024.aspx