Visual Studio Add-in : Creating Context Menus

Note: I assume basic knowledge of what Visual Studio Add-ins are and how to create a sample add-in and tweak it.

There are several articles around the internet that will get you up and started with creating a visual studio add-in (sorry to say, most of them are just rip-offs of the stock-msdn-walk-through on how to create a visual studio add-in from the extensibility wizard). I present here my findings (the hard way, due to lack of proper documentation of these things).

So you have decided to create a visual studio add-in and know what you want to add where. Let’s take the simplified form of what I created and while we do this, we will come across issues that you might not find answer of elsewhere (at least I couldn’t).

Most add-ins require a Menu Items to be added in the main toolbar. Now I’m not going to tell you about how to do that since there are several articles on that already (heck even the walk-through that comes with MSDN tells you how to do that). I’m going to tell you how to add a button anywhere in the visual studio environment (say, on a context menu).

Filed under: programming, Troubleshooter, visual studio, add-ins, commandbars, context menus, visual studio, visual studio commandbars, visual studio extensibility