| Author: |
Carlos J. Quintero (Microsoft MVP) |
Applies to: |
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2002 |
| Date: |
September 2005 |
|
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 |
| |
|
|
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 |
Introduction
This article describes how to get properties from the DTE.Properties
collection from a Visual Studio .NET add-in or macro.
More Information
Visual Studio .NET provides many options to customize it through the "Tools",
"Options" menu. In this Options window you can select a category (folder) and a
page (node) in the left part of the window and then the properties for that page
are displayed to the right. When you need to set or get a property value
programmatically, you have to use the EnvDTE.DTE.Properties method, which
returns an indexed EnvDTE.Properties object. The EnvDTE.DTE.Properties method
receives two string parameters: the category and the page, whose values may be
difficult to guess for a given the property. There are two ways to get the
category and the page for a property:
- To read the Visual Studio .NET documentation about DTE.Properties, which is
located at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsintro7/html/vxgrfdtepropertiescollections.asp
- To use regedit.exe tool to search in the Windows registry the categories,
pages and property names, which are located at:
For Visual Studio .NET 2002: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.0\AutomationProperties For Visual Studio .NET 2003: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\AutomationProperties For Visual Studio 2005: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\AutomationProperties
Under that registry key, there are categories (the first argument of
DTE.Properties) such as "Environment", "FontsAndColors", "Projects" or "TextEditor".
Inside the registry key for each category there are page names (the second
argument of DTE.Properties). For example, the "Environment" category has the
pages "Documents", "General", "Help", etc.
Notice that the user interface provided by the Options window may arrange
categories, pages and options in a different way than the information stored in
the registry.
Go back to the 'Resources for Visual Studio .NET extensibility' section for more articles like this
You can code, design, locate code and document your apps much faster using VB.NET, C#, C++ or Visual J#: 
|