BlackHC’s Adventures in the Dev World

Small update: After hours and hours of error and trial (and implementing a few interfaces by using Copy&Paste wisely), I've finally managed to get Visual Studio to load my debug engine.

This looks gorgeous, doesn't it?

A few notes for those interested in writing Debug Engines:

• See my previous post for the ProvideDebugEngine helper attribute
• There exists a really nice managed debug engine example, that isn't part of the SDK.
  You can find it here.
• You are required to set a PortSupplier, even if the documentation says otherwise (this was a major source of frustration in the last hour).
• Since ProvideDebugEngine requires a Type for PortSupplier, I've been using this stub class:

      /// <summary>
      /// The class is just a stub for use with ProvideDebugEngine.
      /// It seems it's mandatory to provide a PortSupplier GUID with a debug engine.
      /// </summary>
      [Guid("708C1ECA-FF48-11D2-904F-00C04FA302A1")]
      internal sealed class DefaultPortSupplier
      {
      }
  

• I've also added another attribute (ProvideClass) for convenience to register a class directly (it's the same as using ProvideObject on the current class type).
  Since the code is quite short, I'm going to supply it directly:

  using System;
  using System.Collections.Generic;
  using System.Linq;
  using System.Text;
  
  namespace Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell
  {
      /// <summary>
      /// This is just a wrapper for ProvideObject to provide the class the attribute is used on
      /// </summary>
      [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)]
      class ProvideClass : RegistrationAttribute
      {
          public override void Register(RegistrationAttribute.RegistrationContext context)
          {
              ProvideObjectAttribute objectProvider = new ProvideObjectAttribute(context.ComponentType);
              objectProvider.Register(context);
          }
  
          public override void Unregister(RegistrationAttribute.RegistrationContext context)
          {
              ProvideObjectAttribute objectProvider = new ProvideObjectAttribute(context.ComponentType);
              objectProvider.Unregister(context);
          }
      }
  }
  

And yes, I love the tag
Cheers,
Andreas