Professional Visual Studio® 2008

52.5. Develop an Add-In

A common step in building an add-in is developing it. Many common steps of the add-in creation process are automated by the Add-in Wizard, Visual Studio templates, and other tools, but you still need to write your own programming code to get what you desire from an add-in.

This development process depends on your requirements and your programming language and programming knowledge, but overall the development process is similar for all programming languages and add-ins.

As in other development projects, you can use classes, modules, methods, and other programming concepts to write an add-in, but the important point is the right usage of add-in methods to make them work. There are five methods (related to five events) in the add-in lifecycle that you need to apply in order to start and activate your add-in. There are also two methods for command handling and showing user interface elements.

To get started with the development process for an add-in, you can look at the following quick example covering the main aspects of add-in development. In this example you learn how to develop an add-in that lets you copy a piece of selected text in an editor to a clipboard.

After creating the add-in project and checking the checkboxes to include Tools menu items, you have an initial generated code to get started with. To write such an add-in you need to handle the command associated with the add-in in the Exec method in order to copy the selected text to the clipboard. ...