vs-extensibility

The aim here is to incorporate StackOverflow popular answers into Visual Studio's Exception Assistant. I have trawled the web without luck, the only information I could find about customizing the Exception Assistant is this link below that shows how to add links to the "Troubleshooting Tip" area: http://abhijitjana.net/2011/01/07/exception-occurred-get-troubleshooting-tips-from-your-favorites-blogs/ My question is it possible to tap into other areas of the Exception Assistant such as: Actions, View Details? I also found that adding links to Troubleshooting Tip area is limited: http://social

How can I check/detect which Visual Studio version is running under my VSPackage? I cannot get from the registry because the computer could have several versions installed, so I guess there is an API that is able to get it. Anybody knows how to get it from a managed Visual Studio package using C#? You could try to get version via automation DTE object . In MPF you could get it in this way: EnvDTE.DTE dte = (EnvDTE.DTE)Package.GetGlobalService(typeof(EnvDTE.DTE)); There are some other related things to retrieve DTE object - via Project.DTE , also read this thread if you're getting null for DTE.

I have some tools that perform updates on .NET solutions, but they need to know the directory where the solution is located. I added these tools as External Tools, where they appear in the IDE Tools menu, and supplying $(SolutionDir) as an argument. This works fine. However, I want these tools to be easier to access in the IDE for the user through a custom top level menu (for which I created a Visual Studio integration package project) and through a context menu on solution nodes (for which I created a Visual Studio add-in project). I'm looking for a way to get the current solution directory

I have coded something like the following: [Attrib(typeof(MyCustomType))] public class TargetType { // ..... } I want to use EnvDTE to get a reference to the CodeElement referenced by the typeof . I know how to get a reference to the attribute argument, and I can use Value , but that gives me the string typeof(MyCustomType) . If I use Value , I have to break down the string and then try to find the type, which gets hairy if there are two types with the same name but different namespaces. Is there an easier way to do this? Is there an easier way to do this? No, I don't think so, atleast for a <