MZ-Tools Articles Series: INFO: Visual Studio version numbers.

Almost three years ago I wrote this post about Visual Studio version numbers. At that time, Visual Studio 2010 was at Community Technology Preview (CTP) state, not even beta, and some values changed in the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) release. Today I have written this new article for the MZ-Tools Articles Series with updated information and some fix:

INFO: Visual Studio version numbers.
http://www.mztools.com/articles/2011/MZ2011011.aspx

As you can see, version numbers are inconsistent across Visual Studio versions. You may have noticed that even the .NET Framework version has become inconsistent: previously you had .NET Framework 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5, and the new version is officially named .NET Framework 4, not .NET Framework 4.0.

MZTools Articles Series: BUG: COMException getting DocComment of method of generic base class

This is a problem that a developer sent me by e-mail and after reproducing it I have documented it here:

BUG: COMException getting DocComment of method of generic base class
http://www.mztools.com/articles/2011/MZ2011009.aspx

and I have opened a bug report at Microsoft Connect:

COMException getting DocComment for method in generic base class in C#
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/683116/comexception-getting-doccomment-for-method-in-generic-base-class-in-c

EnvDTE.Window.Kind vs EnvDTE.Window.ObjectKind

This afternoon I was writing an add-in for a new MZ-Tools series article and while I thought that EnvDTE.Window.Kind returned a Guid to identify the kind of a toolwindow, it actually returns the literal “Tool” for all toolwindows.

I revisited the article:

HOWTO: Getting information about Visual Studio windows from an add-in
http://www.mztools.com/articles/2009/MZ2009010.aspx

and I noticed that the information was incorrect and that in Visual Studio .NET 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2010 (I am unable to test Visual Studio .NET 2002 on Windows 7 64-bit), EnvDTE.Window.Kind doesn’t return a Guid but “Tool” for toolwindows and “Document” for document windows. It is the EnvDTE.Window.ObjectKind property which returns such Guid. So, I have updated the article to fix the misleading information.