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Adding menus & commands to Visual Studio extensions

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This article walks you through the steps to add menus and commands to your Visual Studio extension. Commands are most often used as buttons in menus around Visual Studio. To create a command requires two steps:

  1. Define the command
  2. Handle the click/invocation

Define the command

Every button in every menu is a command. To add a command to your extension, you must define it in the .vsct file first. It could look something like this:

<Buttons>
  <Button guid="MyPackage" id="MyCommand" priority="0x0105" type="Button">
    <Parent guid="VSMainMenu" id="View.DevWindowsGroup.OtherWindows.Group1"/>
    <Icon guid="ImageCatalogGuid" id="StatusInformation" />
    <CommandFlag>IconIsMoniker</CommandFlag>
    <Strings>
      <ButtonText>R&amp;unner Window</ButtonText>
    </Strings>
  </Button>
</Buttons>

This button is placed in the parent group located in the View > Other Windows menu as specified in the Parent element.

You can now run the extension now to see if the command shows up in the right location and menu.

Handle the click/invocations

Once the button is defined, we need to handle what happens when it is invoked. We do that in a C# class that looks like this:

[Command("489ba882-f600-4c8b-89db-eb366a4ee3b3", 0x0100)]
public class MyCommand : BaseCommand<TestCommand>
{
    protected override Task ExecuteAsync(OleMenuCmdEventArgs e)
    {
        // Do something
    }
}

Make sure to call it from your Package class's InitializeAsync method.

protected override async Task InitializeAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken, IProgress<ServiceProgressData> progress)
{
    await this.RegisterCommandsAsync();
 }

The command Guid and ID must match the guid/id pair from Button element in the .vsct file

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