EnvDTE in unmanaged C++

Question

Hi,
This is my first question within the Microsoft Forums (which are structured differently to what i am used to), so i hope I'm categorizing (and formatting) this correctly :)
I just started working with Visual Studio and envDTE. The (Meta / non-VS) project I'm working on shall be written in C++. As a starting Point i found "How to: Add References to Automation Namespaces"
(i was not allowed to link the article), but when i start a new, unmanaged C++ LibraryProject to try it out, the Code sample (without any further code) produces 43 Errors:
#import "libid:80cc9f66-e7d8-4ddd-85b6-d9e6cd0e93e2" version("8.0")
Here, IntelliSense tries to open a File named "libid:80...." within the Project Folder
lcid("0") raw_interfaces_only named_guids
For the first appearance this line, 5 Errors are reported:
col1: C4430: missing type specifier
col1: C2440: 'initializing': cannot convert from const char[2] to int
col1: C2146: Syntax error: missing ';' before identifier raw_interfaces_only
col1: IntelliSense: this declaration has no storage class or type specifier
col11: IntelliSense: (same as error C2146)
further appereances Show the error: C2374: redefinition; multiple initialization
I will not continue listing every single error, as obviously something very General is wrong (and the Errors repeat). I will, however, list some Errors that seem to hold interesting further Information:
According to VS there are Errors in the files dte100.tli:
-line 43, 49 and 55: error C2664: 'void _com_issue_errorex(HRESULT,IUnknown *,const IID &)' : cannot convert argument 2 from 'EnvDTE100::Debugger5 *const ' to 'IUnknown *'
and dte100.tlh:
-line 124: error C2504: 'Debugger4': Baseclass undefined
Using C#, I was able to use the corresponding Code Snippet without any Problem.
Can anyone tell me, what I'm doing wrong?
Regards, Sebastian
Edit: I just found out, that the code example has linebreaks, that should not be there. Furthermore I found "Trying to access DTE2 from unmanaged DLL" where one can find out that the Import of dte90a is missing.
I will try to follow the help there for now, but there is no Information about my IntelliSense problem. Therefore, help is still much appreciated.
Edit 2: My IntelliSense problem seems to have been a bug already in VS2010 (ID: 533526) and VS2012 (ID: 779727). The link to the workaround on the report page of 533526 is dead.

Answer 1

Hi Sebastian,
You'll probably want to familiarize yourself with some rudimentary COM and ATL programming techniques. CComPtr is simply ATL's smartpointer class. Various COM automation interfaces are published as typelibraries (those .OLB files you're #importing), which
generates the interface definitions you use with the smart pointers.
At the end of the day, you need to create an instance of the DTE object that represents the VS IDE. That means calling CoCreateInstance API, or leverage the ATL library similar to the following:
   int hr = S_OK;
   CComPtr<_DTE> spDTE;
   CComPtr<Window> spWindow;
   hr = spDTE.CoCreateInstance(L"VisualStudio.DTE.12.0");
   hr = spDTE->get_MainWindow(&spWindow);
   hr = spWindow->put_Visible(VARIANT_TRUE);
Where I've added the following #import statements to my precompiled header (stdafx.h): Note, these will vary depending upon the interfaces you need.
    //The following #import imports DTE
    #import <dte80a.olb> raw_interfaces_only named_guids
    //The following #import imports DTE80
    #import <dte80.olb> raw_interfaces_only named_guids
    //The following #import imports DTE90
    #import <dte90.olb> raw_interfaces_only named_guids
    //The following #import imports DTE90a
    #import <dte90a.olb> raw_interfaces_only named_guids
    //The following #import imports DTE100
    #import <dte100.olb> raw_interfaces_only named_guids
    //The following #import imports VCProjectEngine interfaces
    #import <vcpb2.tlb> raw_interfaces_only named_guids
    //The followign #import imports VCProjectLibrary interfaces
    #import <vcproject.dll> raw_interfaces_only named_guids
    //The following #import imports VCCodeModelLibrary interfaces
    #import <vcpkg.dll> raw_interfaces_only named_guids
    // The following imports the VSLangProj interfaces
    #import <vslangproj.olb> raw_interfaces_only named_guids
I used the raw_interfaces_only attribute, as I typically prefer to use the ATL classes instead of the compiler generated ones.
Also, I add the following using namespace statements to my .cpp files (after the #include for stdafx.h. You can figure these out by reviewing the .TLH files generated from the #import statements.
    using namespace EnvDTE;
    using namespace EnvDTE80;
    using namespace VSLangProj;
Hopefully, that's enough to get you started.
Sincerely,
Ed Dore