Extending the Status Bar

Article
11/15/2016

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2015. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

You can use the Visual Studio status bar at the bottom of the IDE to display information.

When you extend the status bar, you can display information and UI in four regions: the feedback region, the progress bar, the animation region, and the designer region. The feedback region allows you to display text and highlight the displayed text. The progress bar shows incremental progress for short-running operations such as saving a file. The animation region displays a continuously-looped animation for long-running operations or operation of undetermined length, such as building multiple projects in a solution. And the designer region shows the line and column number of the cursor location.

You can get the status bar by using the IVsStatusbar interface (from the SVsStatusbar service). In addition, any object sited on a window frame can register as a status bar client object by implementing the IVsStatusbarUser interface. Whenever a window is activated, Visual Studio queries the object sited on that window for the IVsStatusbarUser interface. If found, it calls the SetInfo method on the returned interface and the object can update the status bar from within that method. Document windows, for example, can use the SetInfo method to update information in the designer region when they become active.

The following procedures assume that you understand how to create a VSIX project and add a custom menu command. For information, see Creating an Extension with a Menu Command.

Modifying the Status Bar

This procedure shows you how to set and get text, display static text, and highlight the displayed text in the feedback region of the status bar.

Reading and writing to the status bar

Create a VSIX project named TestStatusBarExtension and add a menu command named TestStatusBarCommand.

In TestStatusBarCommand.cs, replace the command handler method code (MenuItemCallback) with the following:

private void MenuItemCallback(object sender, EventArgs e)  
{  
    IVsStatusbar statusBar = (IVsStatusbar)ServiceProvider.GetService(typeof(SVsStatusbar));  

    // Make sure the status bar is not frozen  
    int frozen;  

    statusBar.IsFrozen(out frozen);  

    if (frozen != 0)   
    {  
        statusBar.FreezeOutput(0);  
    }  

    // Set the status bar text and make its display static.  
    statusBar.SetText("We just wrote to the status bar.");  

    // Freeze the status bar.  
    statusBar.FreezeOutput(1);  

    // Get the status bar text.   
    string text;  
    statusBar.GetText(out text);  
    System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(text);  

    // Clear the status bar text.  
    statusBar.FreezeOutput(0);  
    statusBar.Clear();  
}

Compile the code and start debugging.
Open the Tools menu in the experimental instance of Visual Studio. Click the Invoke TestStatusBarCommand button.

You should see that the text in the status bar now reads “We just wrote to the status bar.” and the message box that appears has the same text.

Updating the progress bar

In this procedure we will show how to initialize and update the progress bar.

Open the TestStatusBarCommand.cs file and replace the MenuItemCallback method with the following code:

private void MenuItemCallback(object sender, EventArgs e)  
{  
    IVsStatusbar statusBar = (IVsStatusbar)ServiceProvider.GetService(typeof(SVsStatusbar));  
    uint cookie = 0;  
    string label = "Writing to the progress bar";  

    // Initialize the progress bar.  
    statusBar.Progress(ref cookie, 1, "", 0, 0);  

    for (uint i = 0, total = 20; i <= total; i++)  
    {  
        // Display progress every second.  
        statusBar.Progress(ref cookie, 1, label, i, total);  
        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);  
    }  

    // Clear the progress bar.  
    statusBar.Progress(ref cookie, 0, "", 0, 0);  
}

Compile the code and start debugging.
Open the Tools menu in the experimental instance of Visual Studio. Click Invoke TestStatusBarCommand button.

You should see that the text in the status bar now reads “Writing to the progress bar.” You should also see the progress bar get updated every second for 20 seconds. After that the status bar and the progress bar are cleared.

Displaying an animation

The status bar displays a looping animation that indicates either a long-running operation (for example, building multiple projects in a solution). If you do not see this animation, make sure you have the correct Tools / Options settings:

Go to the Tools/Options / General tab and uncheck Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance. Then check the sub-option Enable rich client visual experience. You should now be able to see the animation when you build the project in your experimental instance of Visual Studio.

In this procedure we display the standard Visual Studio animation which represents building a project or solution.