I've been hitting the DSL trail hard over the last couple weeks and have some designers and code generaters that would be of tremendous value to me if I could figure out how to get my model to interace with DEVENV and interact with project files, references, Types, or other language elements already in the solution.

For instance, I would like to be able to define a property "type" that has to provide a UITypeEditor capable of browsing the the project in a similar way that the Class View operates to enable the user to reference and datatype a property without having to manually type it in.

In another case, I would like to be able to add or remove files to the project in response to user actions within the DSL such as automatically (or through a command) add partial classes to the solution to add custom code to the generated code.

I know that the model can't really respond to events that occur within the ide, but I would like to be able to command the ide to do things in response to the model.

I hope that makes sense.

Aaron

Aaron,

You can get a reference to the COM Visual Studio extensibility model with the following line of code:

EnvDTE.DTE dte = MyLanguagePackage.GetGlobalService(typeof(EnvDTE._DTE)) as EnvDTE.DTE;

You will also need to add a reference to [Program Files]Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies\EnvDTE.dll. This should let you walk the solutions and projects hierarchy to build up a project tree in your UITypeEditor.

You can also use "[MyLanguage]Package.GetGlobalService" / "ServiceProvider.GetService" to get at other Visual Studio services, such as e.g. IVsMonitorSelection. This would let you register for notifications when changes occur in the IDE (although if you are doing this, make sure that it is your DslPackage that is handling the notifications, not the Dsl itself).

Searching in this forum for GetService / GetGlobalService will bring up examples of what other people are doing. One of those postings (http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=252142&SiteID=1) covers programmatically adding files to a project.

Duncan