I have received several bug reports in the last years about MZ-Tools for Visual Studio .NET that after some investigation I have discovered that the bugs only happen when certain 3rd party add-in or package is installed, or even not installed. For example, this one only happens when CodeRush is installed. And this other one only happens in VS 2008 if the Code Analysis Tools are not installed. And I have found another ones that I have not even documented in this blog, just patching my code to prevent them.

Since diagnosing those bugs is extremely difficult without that information, my new MZ-Tools 7.0 for Visual Studio includes in the bug reports information about loaded add-ins and installed products. I have created an article with a sample add-in to show how to get that information:

HOWTO: Get loaded add-ins and installed products from a Visual Studio add-in.
http://www.mztools.com/articles/2012/MZ2012009.aspx

The article explains too a Registry redirection that Visual Studio 2010 and higher does, which I mentioned the first time in this post.

And you can get even more information to be included in bug reports here:

HOWTO: Detect installed Visual Studio editions, packages or service packs
http://www.mztools.com/articles/2008/MZ2008003.aspx