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Implementing Custom Categories and Display Items

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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

A VSPackage can provide control of the fonts and colors of its text to the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) through custom categories and display items.

Custom categories and display items are on the Fonts and Colors property page. To open the Fonts and Colors property page, on the Tools menu, click Options. Expand Environment and then click Fonts and Colors.

When using this mechanism, VSPackages must implement the IVsFontAndColorDefaultsProvider interface and its associated interfaces.

In principle, this mechanism can be used to modify all existing Display items and the Categories that contain them. However, it should not be used to modify the Text EditorCategory or its Display items. For more information, see Font and Color Overview.

To implement custom Categories or Display items, a VSPackage must:

  • Create or identify categories in the registry.

    The IDE's implementation of the Fonts and Colors property page uses this information to correctly query for the service supporting a given category.

  • Create or identify groups (optional) in the registry.

    It may be useful to define a group, which represents the union of two or more categories. If a group is defined, the IDE automatically merges subcategories and distributes display items within the group.

  • Implement IDE support.

  • Handle font and color changes.

    For information, see Accessing Stored Font and Color Settings.

To create or identify categories

  • Construct a special type of category registry entry under [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft \Visual Studio\<Visual Studio version>\FontAndColors\<Category>]

    <Category> is the non-localized name of the category.

  • Populate the registry with two values:

    Name Type Data Description
    Category REG_SZ GUID A GUID created to identify the category.
    Package REG_SZ GUID The GUID of the VSPackage service that supports the category.

    The service specified in the registry must provide an implementation of IVsFontAndColorDefaults for the corresponding category.

To Create or Identify Groups

  • Construct a special type of category registry entry under [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft \Visual Studio\<Visual Studio version>\FontAndColors\<group>]

    <group> is the non-localized name of the group.

  • Populate the registry with two values:

    Name Type Data Description
    Category REG_SZ GUID A GUID created to identify the group.
    Package REG_SZ GUID The GUID of the service that supports the category.

    The service specified in the registry must provide an implementation of T:Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.IVsFontAndColorGroup for the corresponding group.

To Implement IDE Support

  • Implement GetObject, which returns either an IVsFontAndColorDefaults interface or an T:Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.IVsFontAndColorGroup interface to the IDE for each Category or group GUID supplied.

  • For every Category it supports, a VSPackage implements a separate instance of the IVsFontAndColorDefaults interface.

  • The methods implemented through IVsFontAndColorDefaults must provide the IDE with:

    • Lists of Display items in the Category.

    • Localizable names for Display items.

    • Display information for each member of Category.

    Note

    Every Category must contain at least one Display item.

  • The IDE uses the T:Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.IVsFontAndColorGroup interface to define a union of several categories.

    Its implementation provides the IDE with:

    • A list of the Categories that comprise a given group.

    • Access to instances of IVsFontAndColorDefaults supporting each Category within the group.

    • Localizable group names.

  • Updating the IDE:

    The IDE caches information about Font and Color settings. Therefore, after any modification of the IDE Font and Color configuration, it is advisable to make sure that the cache is up-to-date.

    Updating the cache is done through the IVsFontAndColorCacheManager interface and can be performed globally or just on selected items.

To Handle Font and Color Changes

To properly support the colorization of text that a VSPackage displays, the colorization service supporting the VSPackage must respond to the user-initiated changes made through the Fonts and Colors properties page. A VSPackage does this by:

  • Handling IDE-generated events by implementing the IVsFontAndColorEvents interface.

    The IDE calls the appropriate method following user modifications of the Fonts and Colors page. For example, it calls the OnFontChanged method if a new font is selected.

    -or-

  • Polling the IDE for changes.

    This can be done through the system-implemented IVsFontAndColorStorage interface. Although primarily for support of persistence, the GetItem method can be used to obtain font and color information for Display items. For more information, see Accessing Stored Font and Color Settings.

    Note

    To ensure that the results obtained by polling are correct, it may be useful to use the IVsFontAndColorCacheManager interface to determine if a cache flush and update are needed prior to calling the retrieval methods of the IVsFontAndColorStorage interface.

See Also

QueryService
IVsFontAndColorDefaults
IVsFontAndColorEvents
IVsFontAndColorStorage
IVsFontAndColorGroup
IVsFontAndColorDefaultsProvider
Getting Font and Color Information for Text Colorization
Accessing Stored Font and Color Settings
How to: Access the Built-in Fonts and Color Scheme
Font and Color Overview