User-designed automation features are constructed with code. They provide developers with direct programmatic access to the Visual Studio. With the automation capabilities in Visual Studio. NET, developers gain access to an extremely rich model for tailoring the development environment to their specific needs. To enable customization of nearly every aspect of the environment, Visual Studio.
NET exposes a comprehensive object model.
Consisting of almost 200 objects, this model provides direct access to the Visual Studio code editor, project hierarchy, code model, debugger, menus and commands, the build process, as well as the various tool windows that comprise Visual Studio. NET, including the task list, toolbox, and solution explorer. All of these functional groups are fully outlined in Figure 1. The TaskListEvents object, a member of the Events group, enables developers to respond to events that occur in the Task List tool window. Another object in this group is the BuildEvents object, which enables developers to write code behind events that occur in a build operation, such as the start or completion of the build process.