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Writing Add-ins for Visual Studio .NET
by Les Smith

Publisher: Apress Buy it Now! 

ISBN: 1590590260
Format: Paperback, 552pp
CD: NO

Add-in? What the hack is and "Add-in" a developer could ask. We've all more or less accustomed to working with "out of the box" RAD environments like Borland's Delphi or MS Visual Studio .NET development suite. What you might not know is that Borland and Microsoft have made their IDEs extensible and remarkably flexible to allow developers to change the environment to suit their individual development needs.

Add-in is a tool, a special type of DLL (.NET assembly in VS.NET) that you can create and compile in VS.NET and then extend (by customizing) Visual Studio's IDE. The primary aim is to create add-ins for those tasks you do several times in everyday development process: suppose a tool that add's a time stamp and some other (to you) important information above a procedure implementation each time you finish writing a sub line. Or, imagine a (visual) tool that helps you in writing code for message boxes - "Anyone can write a simple message command. However, when you start to ask lengthy questions, use different icons, use several buttons, etc... A message box designer would help just fine!" This is just one of the add-ins you'll learn how to build through this book. Add-Ins allow developers to develop products faster and get those products to market faster.

Writing Add-Ins for Visual Studio .NET is designed to get the experienced add-in developer up to speed in developing add-ins in Visual Studio .NET very quickly. At the same time the book does not assume that the reader is an experienced add-in developer. *Beginners don't be afraid of your development environment* is what this book is suggesting.

Les Smith's book begins by teaching the reader to use the Add-In Wizard to create the basic framework, from there the author, as expected, gives a discussion on running and installing an add-in inside the IDE. In it's 13 chapters the book easily provides the reader with enough information to start developing add-ins right away. First, some easier code examples are provided, like how to build "the smart desktop add-in" to help you do tasks like deleting a block of code or comment a block of code more efficiently. Working your way through the book you'll also find how to write add-ins to create a new Windows application project; how to record, run, write and debug macros; manipulate Solution and Project objects, etc.

Visual Studio .NET introduces a Class Library of over 3,400 classes. The greatest challenge that the add-in developer will encounter is finding the objects, methods, and events that are needed to perform the desired functionality in an add-in. Smith's book goes into the use of the required objects in every major area that the reader might need to develop functionality.

Appendix A is a complete list of major extensibility objects that you need to use to write fairly complex add-ins. Appendix B is the part of the book that can be called book itself. In more than 40 "how Do I..?" questions, the author provides coded answers for most frequent questions around implementing add-ins.

Finally, this book is a must have for every add-in developer, and for all developers who are trying to cut down on the time to develop an application.

By going through the book one more time, I did finally found what is missing. The author does not provide any ready-made code to help you write add-ins for database programming tasks. VS.NET by default has several great helping tools to ease the pain of database development. However, to see how to build a tool to help placing data-bounded text boxes on a Form will be more that great. Delphi uses will know what I mean!