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At the bottom of the External Tools dialog, you’ll see more options for customizing the external tool within visual studio. Today’s tip is about the Use output window option. The idea here is you’re running a .bat file, and you want to track the progress within Visual Studio. (and if you have a great real-world example, please leave a comment.)
Using the command prompt as the tool, you can set the Arguments to something like “/C echo $(CurText)” where
/C – from cmd.exe, carries out the command specified by string and then terminates
and
$(CurText) is a token that comes from Visual Studio that represents the currently-selected text.
Now running this external tool with a line of text selected in the editor, we get the following in the output window:
Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip,VS2008Tip
Anonymous
April 29, 2008
Real-world example: I've got the TFPT command BranchHistory set as an external tool, and the resulting history appears in the output window.Anonymous
April 29, 2008
Thanks Saara for a great series of blogs. I read every one of them. Keep the great work going! /Johan Stockholm, SwedenAnonymous
June 19, 2008
How do you extend the External Tools to display more than 3 items on the Tools menu? OOB it only shows 3, and if you add more than three external tools they don't seem to show up on the menu. How do you resolve this?