Sample Visual Studio 2008 Fonts and Color Provider

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Adding a new Font and Color category to the Visual Studio Options dialog is, admittedly, a little tricky. There are several services your package must proffer, an interface you must implement and registry keys you must provide (one of them very poorly named!). I was recently asked to provide a fully working sample to help with a debugging session so I thought I’d share it.

For this blog I found two exceptional resources. Dr Ex. has a good blog post about the process for contributing to the Visual Studio fonts and colors dialog located here. There was also a post by Matthew Etter located here about creating a derived RegistrationAttribute to construct the necessary Visual Studio keys. Going from those postings to an actual working contributor is still a bit of a challenge though.

The sample involves one package which contributes a “FontAndColorCategory” to the Options dialog. It also contributes one color called “MyColor”.

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The aforementioned blog posts and msdn help should be able you to navigate and understand the source so I’m not going to repeat anything here. Hopefully a fully working example will expedite your own development efforts.

· The full source for the fonts and color provider can be downloaded here.

-- Patrick