I'm currently developing an application and I got so tired of looking at the same old MessageBox that I've been looking at for years and thought surely someone on CP has a better mouse trap. I found a few fairly decent solutions but then discovered that when Vista came out Microsoft included a very nifty TaskDialog control and provided an API but it was in unmanaged code. So I looked around a little more and found an excellent article by KevinGre TaskDialog for WinFormsthat was basically a wrapper but when I tried to run it I had problems and as opposed to diving into old code (written in Jan 2007) I looked around for something more recent.

I've been asked to provide some insight into Visual Studio Extensibility and since it is such a huge subject I've decided to break it down into a series of acticles starting with the basics and branching out into different areas depending on interest (yours and mine) so if you have a particular area that you would like me to write about please leave me a message and I'll do my best to get something on paper. Also if you have any questions feel free to message me and I will get back to you. The response to your questions depends on the amount of information you provide me!

The ToDoManager extension is a basic application that was created to allow the user to manage Tasks from within Visual Studio, to provide as much information about the task as possible and to be simple to use while keeping resource usage at a minimum. Originally developed for the new AVR Studio 5.0 IDE it can also be used with Visual Studio 2010 and is ideal for the lone developer as a replacement for the Visual Studio TaskManager. And now updated for the AVRStudio 5.1 and Atmel Studio 6.0.

In the pipeline, the Handler is called last and when it is called, the appropriate HTTPHandler is executed. Since the HTTPApplication object will call the HTTPHandler to process the request and generate a response we can use our handler to implement our call to the business layer to update the count for the file in question and fulfill the request for the download.

Don't know why I couldn't get my head wrapped around this but after spending way to much time figuring it out from bits and pieces found while googling I thought it might be of benefit to others.
I have a Wpf control library that contains Custom controls that derive from System.Windows.Control and have no markup associated with them.  I have also created a ResourceDictionary with a Style defined and when I create a control I want to dynamically assign this Style to it but since it has not been loaded am not able to access the style defined in the ResourceDictionary.
The solution is listed below;

/// 

/// Dynamically loads the dictionary from ganttWpfControl.dll.
/// 
private void LoadDictionary()
{
   //Has to be a realtive Uri for the Load to work
   Uri uri = new Uri("/ganttWpfControl;component/Resources/ItemDictionary.xaml",  UriKind.Relative);
   ResourceDictionary rd = Application.LoadComponent(uri) as ResourceDictionary;

   Resources.MergedDictionaries.Add(rd);
}

public void AddItem(ganttItemControl item)
{
   item.Style = (Style)Resources["ItemStyle"];
   Children.Add(item);
}

The RichText Control is a lightweight control that can be seamleesly integrated into your application to provide a rich set of features that rival those of a control you would have to pay for. Among its many features this control allows the user to insert single or multiple images, open and save files in either raw or rich text formats and maintains a transparent background allowing the developer to add background content including images.