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Writing Add-Ins for Visual Studio .NET Authors: Smith L. Published year: 2002 Pages: 7-10/172 |
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Who Should Read This Book?
This book is for intermediate to advanced VB programmers who may or may not have previous experience writing add-ins. It will be helpful if you have written add-ins in VB 5.0 or VB 6.0, but this is not a prerequisite for using this book. If you have only used add-ins and wondered how they were created, this book will teach you to write them in Visual Studio .NET. If you are faced with moving addins from VB 5.0/6.0 to .NET, this book will show you what must be changed.
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How This Book Is Organized
The object of this book is to take you from the basics of simply creating your first add-in to building some fairly complex features into an add-in. With this in mind, each chapter covers a new facet of extensibility. As you learn new material in each chapter, you will add new functionality to your add-in. Although you will build several add-ins in the course of this book, you will also add functionality to the basic add-in that you create in Chapter 2.
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What This Book Does Not Do
This book does not rehash the theory behind programming practices, nor does it give you an example of the use of every method, property, and constant in the extensibility model. There are currently 500 topics that appear in the Search Result window of the MSDN help file if you search on the word "extensibility". The book does not teach you how to use every one of the methods ; nor does MSDN, for that matter. The extensibility model exposes many objects that you probably won't need in writing many practical, timesaving add-ins.
Most important, this book is not an introduction to Visual Studio .NET. This book assumes that you are already developing programs in Visual Studio .NET, and therefore it does not attempt to explain the basics of Visual Studio .NET. Addins are not meant for beginning programmers, in any version of Visual Basic, and that is especially true of writing add-ins for Visual Studio .NET. If you are not already programming in .NET, I strongly suggest that you get a good introductory book on the subject and spend a good amount of time working with basic Visual Studio .NET programming before you tackle add-ins.
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What This Book Does
It is not enough just to teach you how to create an add-in. The Add-in Wizard can do that for you without you writing a line of code. The problem is that it won't do anything! This book will teach you how to create the user interface (UI) to the add-in. In other words, it will show you how to get your menu(s) and tool buttons on the Visual Studio .NET UI. That has always been the hardest part of learning to write add-ins for me. This book will also teach you how to debug an add-in. This is always challenging, no matter how good a programmer you are. In addition, it will show you how to manipulate code in Windows and controls on forms.
Chapter 10 deals with the subject of handling multiple languages in an addin. In that chapter you will see an add-in created in Visual C#. That add-in will call a DLL written in Visual Basic .NET. You will see that it is easy to write an addin in multiple languages that can manipulate projects that are being developed in one or more different languages.
In addition to teaching you the basics of writing an add-in, this book illustrates how to write some real, usable, timesaving features, which to me is the main purpose of add-ins. You will find as you examine some of my code that I am a pragmatist, not a purist. You may not agree with that philosophy, but again, as a self-employed consultant I am paid for producing, not theorizing, philosophizing, or trying to squeeze the last, unneeded line of code from a procedure. Some developers spend needless hours examining, and usually rewriting, other people's code simply because they don't like the way it's written. Many times, I've supervised this type of developer and found that they not only didn't improve the code, they broke it, simply because they did not take time to "understand all they knew" about the code. This type of developer is afflicted with an NIHS (Not In His or Her Shop) mentality . In other words, if the NIHS developer didn't write it, it can't be any good. We've all met this type of developer. Please don't be one!
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Writing Add-Ins for Visual Studio .NET Authors: Smith L. Published year: 2002 Pages: 7-10/172 |
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