One of the things that I do from time to time is to take a question in the MSDN Visual Studio Integrate or StackOverflow forums about a subject of VSX that I am not very familiar with, and try to investigate and provide an answer. The other day I picked this one about extending the Solution Explorer filter with a custom filter, something that I didn’t know.

The question was that following the MSDN Walkthrough: Extending the Solution Explorer Filter the sample didn’t work for VS 2013 Update 4. I reproduced the issue and after some investigation I concluded that it was a bug in VS 2013, because the version of the Walkthrough for VS 2012 actually worked. I reported it to Microsoft Connect (the report seems to have been deleted now) and actually what was wrong was the MSDN sample, which should use the SVsServiceProvider parameter type (instead of IServiceProvider type) in this constructor:

public FileNameFilterProvider(SVsServiceProvider serviceProvider, ...)

There is now a MSDN feature suggestion to fix the code sample. But the sample has other two bugs:

• The Utilities.cs class is no longer required, you can use the provided HierarchyUtilities class.
• The command should not be bound with an event handler in the Initialize() method of the package. Its command guid/id are used as parameters in the SolutionTreeFilterProvider attribute to bind the command with the filter.