Daniel Cazzulino's Blog

At Clarius we've spent years doing Visual Studio extensibility. Literally. We LOVE doing so. We did so much of it during the years that chances are pretty high you've been using some of our stuff (fully or partially developed by us) at one point or another. A non-exhaustive list includes:

The new Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools bring a new Add Reference dialog that completely replaces the classic one when you click the familiar Add Reference command:

If you have been using VS2010 for any significant amount of time, you surely came across the awkward, slow and hard to use Add Reference dialog. Despite some (apparent) improvements over the VS2008 behavior, in its current form it's even LESS usable than before. A brief non-exhaustive summary of the typical grief with this dialog is:

In the latest and greatest version of Visual Studio, MEF plays a critical role, one that makes extending VS much more fun than it ever was.

For documentation purposes, I just draw the following UML sequence diagrams for the “Astoria” pipeline, using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate:

I have already written about other alternative ways of implementing INotifyPropertyChanged, as well as augment your view models with a bit of automatic code generation for the same purpose. But for some co-workers, either one seemed a bit too much :o).

public static IEnumerable<ValidationResult> Validate(object component)
{
    return from descriptor in TypeDescriptor.GetProperties(component).Cast<PropertyDescriptor>()
            from validation in descriptor.Attributes.OfType<System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.ValidationAttribute>()
            where !validation.IsValid(descriptor.GetValue(component))
            select new ValidationResult(
                validation.ErrorMessage ?? string.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture, "{0} validation failed.", validation.GetType().Name),
                new[] { descriptor.Name });
}

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