Get Assembly Full Name using context menu

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jul 27, 2013

Assembly Full Name - What is it?

.NET assemblies contain full name, also known as fully qualified name. The full name is stored in the meta data of the assembly and it used by .net runtime to uniquely identify it from another with the same name. The fully qualified name is majorly used during assembly resolution and during registering http handlers. For more information on Assembly Full Name read here

Integration with Visual Studio Options Window using custom controls

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jun 30, 2013

If you are developing Visual Studio extensions for your users, sooner or later you would have a functionality where you want to let users to configure some values. The best way to provide configurable options to users. So in this blog post I will show you how you can integrate your extension to Options window of Visual Studio.

Check the screenshot below of options window created in Avanade Extensions for VS2013 – a Visual Studio extension created by Tarun and me.

Subscribe to Windows Explorer close event

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jun 29, 2013

Lately I am busy working on developing a small shell extension. There is a functionality in my shell extension, that user opens the .NET windows form by right clicking on a file (context menu). The user then decides to close the parent explorer window (instead of closing the windows form opened). Now, in such a case I would like to close the windows form too. So, to achieve this I had to subscribe to the close event of the windows explorer. The below code shows the how to achieve the same. Although I am monitoring window close (destroy event), this can done for any process in Windows for which you have the handler (For ex: Notepad). Read more at link provided in “References” section.

Developing shell extensions in C# with EZShellExtensions.Net

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jun 21, 2013

Ever since I got to know about existence of shell extension programming for Windows I always wanted to write one. The utilities provided by shell extensions is umpteen in Windows. However, being a C# developer has always limited me to get in to shell programming as its majorly based on C/Win32 programming. Moreover till .NET 4.0, writing shell extensions using managed code was not supported officially (MSDN).

Loading custom assemblies in Visual Studio extensions

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jun 2, 2013

If you ever tried to use/load third party assemblies inside your Visual Studio add-in or extensions, there is a good chance that you would have ran in to exception. This is because, Visual Studio extensions are hosted by Visual Studio process and they run in Visual Studio’s app domain. Extension on their own do not have their application domains. However, there is a bright side and you can still load the assemblies you want. The trick is that, when Visual Studio tries to load the assemblies it tries to resolve the assemblies which installed extensions are dependent upon. Hence, during this time, the Visual Studio fires AssemblyResolve event. So below are the steps to dynamically resolve the third-party assembly path and help Visual Studio resolve them.

Favorites Menu for Visual Studio

Utkarsh Shigihalli on May 11, 2013

Favorites Menu for Visual Studio, is a FREE add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. This add-in will help in marking your frequently used files as your favorites within Visual Studio IDE and then you can access these any time and inside Visual Studio Environment.