Handling different Visual Studio versions

Visual Studio Program ID

As you have already seen in our basic articles, you need to create a Visual Studio DTE object before implementing Automation Interface code because of the TwinCAT 3 integration into the Visual Studio environment. If you have installed more than one Visual Studio version on your Engineering PC and would like to choose which version should be used along with the Automation Interface code, you need to determine the so-called Program ID (ProgID) of the corresponding Visual Studio version. The ProgID is located in the Windows Registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and has the following format: VisualStudio.DTE.X.Y.

The following table shows the ProgIDs for the currently supported versions of Visual Studio:

Specify Visual Studio version in Automation Interface code

To specify the Visual Studio version in Automation Interface code, you need to use the ProgID as a paremeter of the GetTypeDromProgID() method during the creation process of the DTE object.

Code Snippet (C#):

Type t = System.Type.GetTypeFromProgID("VisualStudio.DTE.15.0");
EnvDTE.DTE dte = (EnvDTE.DTE)System.Activator.CreateInstance(t);

Code Snippet (Powershell):

$dte = new-object-com VisualStudio.DTE.15.0