Cameron and Mick from G’day World just ambushed me on Skype. I bored them briefly about a new feature I found in Whidbey (VS2005). Its a feature targetted at component developers who need to integrate with the IDE at design-time (when else would you integrate with the IDE).

I posted up some code that I had to write earlier this year, I posted it up for safe keeping (disclaimer, this was prototype code that had bugs that were fixed after the post). With Whidbey that code boils down to this:

ITypeDiscoveryService discoveryService = (ITypeDiscoveryService)this.GetService(
     typeof(ITypeDiscoveryService)
     );
ICollection types = discoveryService.GetTypes(typeof(Form), false);

This code gives me a list of types that derive from the Form class. If you look at the code that my original post linked to you can see that I had to do all kinds of nasty things like walking the internal VS version of CodeDom (not quite CodeDom but close) and enumerating the assembly references and picking the types out of them.

Thanks to the PM’s, devs and tests over in Redmond for this, its a small feature but I appreciate it . . .