| Author: |
Carlos J. Quintero (Microsoft MVP) |
Applies to: |
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2002 |
| Date: |
September 2005 |
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Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 |
| Updated: |
March 2013 |
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Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 |
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Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 |
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Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 |
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Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 |
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) on 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 names:
Determining the Names of Property Items in Options Pages
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165642.aspx
- To use regedit.exe tool to search in the Windows registry the categories,
pages and property names, which are located at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\AutomationProperties
Where <version> is:
- 7.0 for Visual Studio .NET 2002
- 7.1 for Visual Studio .NET 2003
- 8.0 for Visual Studio 2005
- 9.0 for Visual Studio 2008
- 10.0 for Visual Studio 2010
- 11.0 for Visual Studio 2012
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.
Note: that registry entry stores the property names, not the actual values
(which being per-user are stored in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive).
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.
- Some properties are not exposed through EnvDTE.Properties, so you may need to
read the registry settings directly, which are located for each user at
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\<category>. For
example:
- C# formatting options (introduced by Visual Studio 2005), which you can read
from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\CSharp\Options.
Notice however that these settings are updated only when Visual Studio exits,
not when they are changed through the Options window.
- Text Editor \ XAML settings which are not exposed through EnvDTE.Properties for
Visual Studio 2008 (Visual Studio 2010 does expose them) at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\AutomationProperties
but whose settings are stored for each user at
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor\XAML (notice
that this registry entry uses "Text Editor" rather than "TextEditor".
- Text Editor \ XOML settings for Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 (which are not
exposed through EnvDTE.Properties), whose settings are stored for each user at
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\Text Editor\XOML.
Go back to the 'Resources for Visual Studio .NET extensibility' section for more articles like this
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