Having found myself developing in VB.NET alongside C# recently, I was rather annoyed at the lack of pre- and post-build-events for VB projects in VS.NET2003.

A quick check of the DTE automation model showed that while the .VBPROJ file schema does not enable persistently storing build event information for VB projects, the EnvDTE.Project object DOES enable you to specify that property, whether it's a C# or VB project - they just won't be persisted to the VBProj file.

Inspired by Roy's recent Add-In contest, I decided to write a plug-in that persisted the build events to custom user properties in the project file and then reloads them into the PostBuildEvents on project load. A quick googling, however, revealed that I am, alas, too late. Microsoft themselves have released this add-in as part of their Automation Samples for extending Visual Studio.

I shall but link, and grieve.

3 Comments

• Manish said Tuesday, September 7, 2004 2:22:00 PM

  Just out of curiosity, how much do the microsoft employees have to pay for MS software like Office or Windows etc?

• Avner Kashtan said Tuesday, September 7, 2004 8:06:00 PM

  Haven't the foggiest, actually - not being an MS employee and all. :)
  I DO know they have a company store and probably an online website to order from, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a hefty discount, but I really don't know the specifics.

• David said Tuesday, January 15, 2008 8:23:10 PM

  We don't have to pay for it;) We have access to a lot more than we could possibly download or use. I just used the VisualStudio add-in and it works like a charm on my VB project under VS2003. Thanks a lot.