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Hack 33. Add an External Tool
Enhance Visual Studio by plugging in all kindsof external tools such as ILDASM. Visual Studio provides
the functionality to include external tools in the Tools menu. If you
go to the Tools menu, you will see a listing of tools including those
like Error Lookup and Create GUID. These are all external tools that
have been configured to be listed in this menu. You can modify the
existing external tools and add your own external tools to this list
quite easily.To modify the existing tools or to add new tools of your own, you
simply need to go to Tools
External Tools. You will thensee the dialog shown in Figure 4-25.
Figure 4-25. External Tools dialog
Studio. You can use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to rearrange
the order of these tools in the menu. You can also click on each of
the tools and modify any of its properties or use the Delete button
to remove a tool from the menu.You can add a new external tool by clicking the Add button. This will
clear out all of the fields and allow you to enter new values and
save a new external tool. In this example, I am going to add a link
to the tool ILDASM. ILDASM is a tool that
can be used to examine the IL of an assembly [Hack #63] .Following are the steps to add ILDASM as an external tool:Click the Add Button.Specify a Title of ILDASM.Specify a command location of C:\Program
Files\Microsoft Visual
Studio .NET
2003\SDK\v1.1\Bin\ILDASM.exe (this path may
vary depending on the version of Visual Studio you are running).Click on the arrow to the right of the Arguments box and choose
Target Path. This will send the complete path of your assembly to
ILDASM.Click the OK button.ILDASM will now be added as an external tool to the Tools menu. You
can click on the ILDASM link and the tool will open with your
assembly already loaded in the tool. Adding external tools for
utilities that you commonly use is a great way to save time and avoid
the hassle of pointing the tool to your assembly or file.
4.11.1. External Tool Arguments
In the ILDASM example, I used the
Target Path argument to pass the name and location of the
project's assembly to the external tool. The 15
different argument variables that you can use when configuring an
external tool are listed in Table 4-1.
Name | Argument | Description |
|---|---|---|
Item Path | $(ItemPath) | The path to the active document. |
Item Directory | $(ItemDir) | The directory where the active document is located. |
Item File Name | $(ItemFileName) | The name of the active document. |
Item Extension | $(ItemExt) | The file extension of the active document. |
Current Line | $(CurLine) | The line position where the cursor is currently resting. |
Current Column | $(CurCol) | The column position where the cursor is currently resting. |
Current Text | $(CurText) | Either the word where the cursor is located or a single line of selected text. |
Target Path | $(TargetPath) | The path (including filename) to the current target. (The target is what your project is compiling into, e.g., the assembly.) |
Target Directory | $(TargetDir) | The directory where the target is. |
Target Name | $(TargetName) | The filename of the target. |
Target Extension | $(TargetExt) | The file extension of the target. |
Project Directory | $(ProjDir) | The drive and directory where the current project is located. |
Project File Name | $(ProjFileName) | The complete path to the current project. |
Solution Directory | $(SolutionDir) | The drive and directory where the current solution is located. |
Solution File Name | $(SolutionFileName) | The complete path to the current solution. |
to your external tool, saving you the time of supplying this
information by hand.You can also set the initial directory where this tool should be run.
This is set using the Initial Directory option. The initial directory
can be set to Item Directory, Target Directory, Target Name, Project
Directory, or Solution Directory. (These arguments are the same as
the arguments defined in Table 4-1.)
4.11.2. External Tool Options
A number of options can also be set when
configuring external tools:
When this option is enabled, any response from the
command line will be shown
in the output window. If you were calling a command-line utility that
reported statistics on your assembly, instead of having to view the
results in the open command prompt, you could have those results
shown in the output window. [Hack #65] includes an example
of doing this with the FxCop command-line utility.
When this option is enabled, you will be prompted every time the tool
is run and allowed to modify or change the
arguments being passed to the external
tool. A good example of when this might be useful is when you have a
tool to which you want to pass the project, solution, or item path,
depending on the circumstances. By prompting you each time, it allows
you to choose which argument you want to pass into the tool.
This option determines whether the command prompt will be
closed after your command has been
executed. Normally this will be set to true, but if the tool you are
calling returns results in the command window, you would not want it
to close. This option is also very handy when debugging an external
tool that is not working, since you can see the error it returns.
Adding and configuring external tools is a great way to customize the
IDE and can save a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted looking
for programs and pointing them at your assemblies or files .
