Problems with Visual Studio 2013

Hi Mike,

I'm not really sure what would cause those sorts of issues since we haven't heard of them before.  My guess is that in the VS 2013 version, Microsoft altered interop somehow and perhaps that is affecting certain input events?  As for the rendering, that almost sounds like the GDI double buffer is getting corrupted somehow.  The only time we've ever seen black areas is if running out of memory though.  Honestly I'm not sure what we could even do if we had a sample here since it seems like something external to the control is triggering this odd behavior.  Especially when you consider that it worked fine in the previous VS versions and our code (as well as yours?) is identical.

For add-ons of more recent VS versions, I would probably suggest that you use WPF instead of WinForms, since the UI foundation of VS is now in WPF.  That would probably help remove any interop oddities that might be occurring here.

Yes I think I'm going to have to contact Microsoft on this one.

The app uses the VS2010 SDK (not 2013) as we need it to work in 2010 and 2012 also. That may have something to do with the issue ... in addition to the fact that it makes direct debugging impossible. (You can't reference the 2010 SDK in the 2013 design environment so you have to attach an external debugger)

This extension shares a lot of code with a (large) stand alone app that uses Windows Forms - so switching it to WPF is not really an option.

I found the root of the problem.

Microsoft changed the LanguagePreferences class such that it is no longer compatible with previous versions. When you call a function that creates an instance of a LanguagePreferences class the call raises an exception.

I had exception handling INSIDE the function but not around the call to the function, so an outer layer of exception handling caused part of my initialization code to be skipped. This explained the lack of Intellisense etc. It also meant that a variable I used for the background color was uninitialized. The result was that I set the background fill color to Color.Empty - and apparently that causes the renderer to do the strange things I described.

FYI for anyone writing VS extensions.
The workaround is to move the code that references LanguagePreferences to its own function and check what version of VS you are running in. If the version is > 11 just set default values - do not call the function that fetches the LanguagePreferences class.