Visual Studio .NET 2005 offers some new APIs for making it easier to host a managed add-in.
For instance, the function
CreateToolWindow2() allows hosting a custom control within a tool window. A shim control is no longer necessary. The function call might look like this:
_toolWindow = toolWins.CreateToolWindow2(
_addInInstance,
asmPath,
ctlProgId,
"AgileTest",
guidString,
ref objTemp);
The documentation states that the
objTemp parameter will contain a reference to the user control hosted in the new tool window. With my experiments so far I have never found that variable to be anything other than
null.
In order to get a reference to my hosted user control I therefore used a different approach.
First I defined an event on the class level for the user control like this:
public static event EventHandler ControlCreated;
private void AgileTestHostCtrl_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {
if(ControlCreated != null) {
ControlCreated(this, null);
}
}
For this event I defined an event handler in the Connect class of the add-in:
void AgileTestCtrl_ControlCreated(object sender, EventArgs e) {
_hostedControl = (AgileTestCtrl)sender;
}
Registering the handler on a class level event is easy:
AgileTestCtrls.AgileTestCtrl.ControlCreated +=
new EventHandler(AgileTestCtrl_ControlCreated);
Now when the user control is loaded the event is fired, and the event handler is called.
The limitation of this solution is obviously that should you need several instances of the same tool window it might get more complicated to distinguish between them. One option to solve this might be to use an event that carries additional information in its properties.
In my case as I don't need more than one instance of the tool window and hence of my user control, this solution works fine and reliable.
Please drop me a note if you are aware of a better solution. Thank you!
On the performance side, we decided that we wanted to measure and reveal the amount of overhead csUnit adds to your unit tests. csUnit is the first unit testing tool, which provides that feature.
We used dotTrace by JetBrains and Microsoft's CLRProfiler to improve overall performance. Our data shows that we have been able to reduce the overhead caused by csUnitRunner, the standalone GUI application to about 1 second per 100 tests. Compared to almost 10 seconds in the past, this is a significant improvement and saves valuable development time.
Concurrently we have also started to talk to different tool vendors, some of them already providing support for csUnit. The idea is to make sure that csUnit provides for the best possible integration in order to help increasing your productivity.
