Sunday, August 28, 2005

Enhancing the Server Explorer Window

I have been experimenting with DXCore from DevExpress (you guys rock!!!!!) for the last couple of days. I am now revisiting an issue I had about a year ago. I had an idea to try to extend the Server Explorer window through an add-in (done the hard way, by not using DXCore) in the following ways:
  1. Right click on any table/view/stored procedure and create an interface based upon the columns.
  2. Build a strongly typed collection and business object based upon these items.
  3. Based upon a database diagram, generate a strongly typed dataset.

When accessing the Server Explorer window, I am able to get the name of the selected node, but I can't figure out how to access the properties. What I would like is a way to get the properties for a selected node in the Server Explorer window.

I use CodeSmith (thanks Eric) to generate the information now, but would still like a way to do this through the Visual Studio IDE. The company I am working for will be with 2003 for a while after 2005 becomes available, so I would like to make this work in 2003.

I would appreciate any feedback....

Until next time

1 comments:

Dave said...

I am working on a similar pluggin. Have you found a good approach to get database/table/column information from a plugin?
thx