Question

In a Visual Studio Add-In that successfully creates a form, but gives me no reference back to the EnvDTE’s prjItem instance.

Here’s the piece of code that adds the form to the project:

string templatePath = solution.GetProjectItemTemplate("Form.zip", "csproj");
ProjectItem prjItem = project.ProjectItems.AddFromTemplate(templatePath, "myForm.cs");

Obs.: ‘solution’ is an EnvDTE80.Solution2 object.

Of cource I can get the reference by other ways, like proj.ProjectItems.Item([index]) (doing a loop and checking for names), but that’s not how I want to do it, and I need this reference in orther to add controls to this form.

Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Just found a comment on MSDN:

AddFromTemplate always returns a NULL
value

At one time, this was true. But
with later versions of Visual Studio,
which included the ability to add
multiple items from a single template,
the return value for this method could
not return multiple items. So it now
returns a NULL value in all instances.
This is due to the contraint that the
COM signature for this particular
method cannot be changed without
breaking a lot of code already in use.

Consequently, if you need the
ProjectItem interface of the item just
added via the AddFromTemplate call,
you can either iterate through the
ProjectItems collection, or you can
create a ProjectItemsEvents.ItemAdded
event just before calling
AddFromTemplate, and store away the
ProjectItem passed to your OnItemAdded
handler.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/envdte.projectitems.addfromtemplate(v=vs.80).aspx#1