I was wondering if it was possible to intercept or disable different Visual Studio commands or features from an extension?
For instance, could you stop a user from accessing the File -> Open command? I’m trying to work on an extension that will help enforce some coding standards and as part of that I’d like to disable or intercept a few different things when users try to do them. For instance, maybe disabling the ability to edit project properties or something similar to stop users from checking in their local changes and breaking the build or messing up other team members.
Do hooks exist for this in the Extension API or are we stuck with the old Word document asking people to play nice?
You can, but I do want to echo Greg’s comment before I give details: you are better off spending your time making a really awesome tool that developers can run to catch “bad problems” than playing whack-a-mole to disable commands. Disabling commands could be dangerous because there are often multiple commands that might do the same “bad” thing. Also, disabling might cause other parts of VS to destabilize. Using your example of project properties, write a tool that runs across your codebase and looks for project files that are “bad”, and spits out a build warning. Have this run every time your developers hit build. That way they still get the near-real-time feedback, without having to make sure they have extensions installed. (plus, you can check that tool into your codebase to ensure everybody is synced)
That said, implementing a IVsRegisterPriorityCommandTarget might be the right option here. The performance ramifications can be significant, so you need to make sure your implementation is fast or else you’ll slow down VS. If you return E_NOTSUPPORTED from the handlers, that will result in normal routing. Returning S_OK but not forwarding would block routing from happening.