Doron Goldberg

Yesterday I published on thecodeproject a small add-in I created a while ago, when I was first playing around with the "Visual Studio Add In" project.

The add-in is a very simple utility which adds a button to the tools menu for converting code that is on the clip board. The possible conversions are form c# to vb.net and from vb.net to c#.

Copy VB.NET:

Select to conversion button:

Your C# code:

The add-in is using an online code translator which can be found here:

While developing a feature developers often need to generate GUIDs, get assembly full names, alter XML's etc.

One of the most helpful tools is available from Andrew Connell. After I managed to make it work (uninstalling any reminder of visual studio 2008 from my machine) it worked great and did make my life easier.

The only problem with the solution are the pre requirements - Refactor Pro! & CodeRush.

Both are great extensions for Visual Studio, only they cost 250$ and we are not planning at the moment (or the one after) to buy licenses to all our developers.

All that led me to start building the dev tools, project templates and add-ins for making things easier. Two of the add-in features I'm currently working on are the "New GUID" & "Assembly Name" buttons I'm adding to the context menu:

Clicking the "New GUID" button simply adds a new GUID to the code and it can be used with a shortcut as well to make things super comfortable. (I know you can go to Tools ->Create GUID->...->...->... and paste your new GUID, but that's too much work! )

As for the full assembly name, well, so far I managed to get the full assembly name of the Add-in itself which is not much of a help.

So,

If you have any idea how can I get the current project's full assembly name from an add-in context - please leave a note.

I'm currently working on a custom feature project template set of visual studio projects for MOSS developers.

I currently have two main project types ready - custom feature and custom master page feature. The first is designed for general features and the second is for master page features.

While playing with the new project I managed to alter a master page and make is look a little bit like MCMS after a few minutes of copy & paste:

The project looks like this:

These projects require as little intervention as possible in altering & rewriting of ddf or xml files (usually none).

The complete set of projects will be ready soon (a few more days since I'm busy working on two other projects...) and then I'll upload them to codeplex.

All the work I have done so far is based on the great job of Andrew connell, Rich Finn and Heather Solomon.

I was inspired to start the project by Ishai Sagi during his visit to Israel a few months ago and by the needs of our developers.