How to find Visual Studio command bars

When developing a Visual Studio Addin it is a common task to add custom commands to existing menus and toolbars. It is a common problem too, not to find the proper command bar (we have to traverse all command bars to see its names, the names are not unique, etc). In these two posts: Using IVsProfferCommands to retrieve a Visual Studio CommandBar and  Using EnableVSIPLogging to identify menus and commands with VS 2005 + SP1 it is very well explained how to solve this problem.

The answer relies on the fact that every toolbar and menu is uniquely identified in Visual Studio by a ...

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CodeCamp Buenos Aires 2008

I attended yesterday to the Microsoft Code Camp event at Buenos Aires. It was fun!

Here's a picture of the Lagash stand:

 

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UI Automation Article Published on Level Extreme

On this month's edition of the Level Extreme .Net Magazine, my article about Building an UI Automation Client Application was published. The article walks through building a client application for automating a win 32 target application (the Windows Address Book). The idea is to show through simple code snippets how to use the UI Automation API for manipulating a target application programmatically through its UI. It shows how to find the UI elements, and how to work with the UI Automation patterns and handle events. The sample client application code contains further examples and can be downloaded from the article's page. Hope you read it!

Read more on the magazine from Martin Salias.

CCF: Listening to External Application Events

It is often necessary to listen to external application UI events when automating applications in CCF. For example, we may need to save a value in the Context if the user presses a button, or do something when an alert dialog appears. There are many ways we can handle events. In CCF 2008, the Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT) provides an easy way to listen to them. If not using HAT we can hook to events using the UIAutomation or MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) APIs within our own application adapters....

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