VSIX Project - Properties Tool window extension

Question

Hello,
There might be something wrong with the way I search for things but here is my problem. I'm looking for a way to implement a custom editing tool within the properties tool window in the Visual Studio editor. I've been lookig through several documentation references, and they all lead to the use of different assemblies, but I can't get anything to work the way that I want.

First of all, I tried using the UITypeEditor class, with the step-by-step tuto I found here : https://learn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/dotnet/api/system.drawing.design.uitypeeditor?view=net-5.0
The problem I faced was that it only seemed to be working with Winforms projects, and I'm trying to use this with a WPF project.

Afterwards, I tried following this tutorial, in order to create a project template : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/creating-a-basic-project-system-part-1?view=vs-2019
This has led me to think that the methods used in the tutorial might have been either deprecated or improved with the used of AsyncPackages instead of ProjectPackages, and the appearance of the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Flavor assembly that seem to render useless the ProjectNode class (it does'nt even show up anymore, the method has been replaced with a void).

The last bit I tried exploring was the use of the ProjectSystem, as documented here : https://github.com/microsoft/VSProjectSystem
It was actually worse because I couldn't get it to work like I wanted, the project type I was creating could not register C# files and I wasn't able to add new classes (I might need to dig a bit deeper here but I don't know where to look).

So basically, I'm looking for help to extend the properties tool window, through an editor within the window, or a modal window opened by clicking on an ellipsis button in the properties window.

Thank you for reading this, if you have any info, I'm very interested.

Answer 1

Hiya, thank you. I've been using this link too and it was why I thought I ought to use this UITypeEditor class, but I never found out how to apply it to WPF. However, I found an interesting thread that allowed me to do exactly what I needed here. Using the propertyValueEditor was what i actually needed and it works out real great.