VSTA Q & A Blog : Visual Studio 2005

Integrating custom help into VSTA

BillL — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:16:00 GMT

I was wondering how to integrate custom help files into VSTA.

So far, pressing F1 shows some general help about VSTA, but nothing that will help my customers to write macros.

VSTA and Visual Studio use Microsoft Help 2.

HelpStudio Lite is the tool in the Visual Studio SDK that you use to author, integrate, and deploy Help content.

Here are some links to help you out (be sure to open the first two in Internet Explorer):

Integrating Help into the IDE

Help Authoring and Integration Guide

MS H2 Collection Tutorial

An introduction to the Help Integration Wizard

Visual Studio 2005 - Free Help 2.x Authoring

Visual Studio 2005 with VSTA v 2.0

BillL — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:12:00 GMT

Because Visual Studio 2008 is not a prerequisite for the VSTA v 2.0 SDK, a VSTA 2.0 integration can be performed with Visual Studio 2005; however, the VSTA v 2.0 IDE and projects are based on Visual Studio 2008. Therefore, like other Visual Studio 2008 project solutions (.sln files), VSTA 2.0 add-ins cannot be opened in Visual Studio 2005. This is by design so there will be no fix.

There is a workaround for opening some Visual Studio 2008 projects in Visual Studio 2005 - select the project file (csproj/vbproj) and choose to open it with Visual Studio 2005

Right click on the file

Select “Open With”

Browse to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe”

The other alternative for some VS 08 projects is to create a new VS 2005 project and add the source code from the target projects.

I do not believe the 1^st workaround works for VSTA 2.0 because the project file is dependent on Visual Studio 2008 in ways the other Visual Studio 2008 projects are not. The 2^nd workaround will allow you to work with the project in Visual Studio 2005; however, it does not carry the VSTA and host specific project file settings and information over to the new Visual Studio 2005 project. Some of these settings could be manually copied over by altering the properties of the Visual Studio 2005 project or copying the xml from the add-in project file to the Visual Studio 2005 project file (like build events, exe to launch on debug, debug command line arguments, and maybe the host information).

Integrating VSTA 2.0 w/ Visual Studio 2005

BillL — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:53:00 GMT

Integrating VSTA 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005 is nearly identical to using VS 2008 with these exceptions:

1. Installing VSTA 2.0 includes .Net framework 3.5. The required System.Addin base classes are only available in .Net 3.5

2. The VSTA 2.0 proxy layer (or automation layer) is auto-generated C# source code using C# 3.0 language features not available in VS2005. This requirement can be cleanly removed by converting the C# source code to compile with C# 2.0 with a macro provided by Summit.

A more complete discussion and a link to the conversion macro are available on Melody’s blog:

Using VSTA v 2 with Visual Studio 2005