Another question about cancelling the IWizard when creating a project, this time in the StackOverflow forum that I am visiting now quite often, has prompted me to create a project template with a wizard using the IWizard interface, as explained in the MSDN documentation How to: Use Wizards with Project Templates. The sample certainly doesn’t show how to cancel the wizard and the IWizard interface methods don’t seem to offer that possibility so apparently it is not possible. However, it is possible in a non-intuitive way: there are two exceptions, WizardCancelledException and WizardBackoutException that the wizard can throw to return to before showing the Add Project dialog, or to that dialog, respectively. There seems to be some cleanup to do, as Rory Primrose explains in his post Pitfalls of cancelling a VSIX project template in an IWizard. You may also find useful a long explanation by Ron Petrusha about Developing Visual Studio Project Wizards, which I will add to the Articles section about templates of this site. And remember that if you want full control of the wizard you can always use the old COM-based IDTWizard interface instead.
Monthly Archives: October 2014
Added StackOverflow reference to the Forums section
While I was aware of the StackOverflow Q&A site all these years, my preference has been always the specific MSDN Visual Studio Integrate forum (formerly MSDN Visual Studio Extensibility forum), and I have only answered a couple of questions in StackOverflow, mainly pointed by someone by e-mail.
However, today I have registered in StackOverflow, added my favorited tags (vsx, vs-extensibility, vsix, vspackage, visual-studio-addins, envdte, visual-studio-sdk, etc.) and I hope to get used to that site and visit it as often as I do with the MSDN VSX forum.
I have also added it to the Forums section of this VSX site since I find it a valuable resource to get answers: https://www.visualstudioextensibility.com/forums/
Project templates wizards (IWizard vs IDTWizard)
A question in the MSDN VSX forum yesterday about fully customizing the solution creation (not the project creation) with a template made me to investigate to provide a long answer and I discovered something that I had totally forgotten: the old COM-based EnvDTE.IDTWizard that appeared in the first versions of Visual Studio .NET (2002/2003) and that can be used still today. That interface provides a single Execute method that allows you full control over the solution/project creation, on the contrary to the new wizard Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizard.IWizard that provides many methods to server as hooks in the project creation. Unfortunately I have had these two days very busy at the office and personal life (and the forecast for the next days doesn’t seem much better) so I haven’t had time to write articles with code about these wizards. Interestingly I have found that I wrote a long article with code for a Spanish magazine 8 years ago about the IDTWizard. Anyway, what I have done is to update the Visual Studio Extensibility section and Templates section to include both kinds of wizards.