InstallShield must be the crappiest "industry standard" application in existence, for reasons too numerous to enumerate here. However, one of those deficiencies is something I'd like to be able to fix, and with my first foray into writing an extension for Visual Studio (currently using 2015 version).
InstallShield has created a .isproj type, to allow integration with Visual Studio. This allows a developer to create an installer that references the output of a project as the files to include in the installer (rather than having to manually select individual files to include). This works well enough as long as the .isproj is being built in Visual Studio, and in a solution that references the project for which you need the output.
However, I also have an automated build for my installer projects, that we run on a build server using MSBuild. When attempting to build this way, we were getting completely opaque error messages indicating that the project output references above couldn't be resolved.
As with all InstallShield errors, Googling for answers turned up nothing except for multitudes of other people having the same problem. So I decided to dig into the plain text of the .isproj to see what I could find.
As it turns out, the .isproj type is a just a regular MSBuild script, and it even has lines commented out that explain options that can be added to the project; one of those things that can be added is an ItemGroup containing ProjectReference nodes. Manually adding the nodes helped solve the problem. Command-line build now works.
However, I am dissatisfied with a) having to manually type this stuff in, b) having no visual representation of what projects are being referenced, and c) not finding out about a problem until the build fails. So, I would like to be able to extend Visual Studio to help me with this. Here's what I'd like to do:
1) Add a "References" node to the project in Solution Explorer that acts like the References node for any normal .csproj.
2) Restrict the available References to other projects in the the current solution.
3) Visually represent a project with missing references (e.g. by underlining the project name with a colored squiggly, as with errors/warnings), and potentially failing the build if missing (depending on whether I want to treat it as an error or a warning; TBD).
To these ends, I've downloaded MPF for Projects - Visual Studio 2013, which provides an SDK for creating a new project type.
However, before digging too deeply, I need to know if it's even possible to EXTEND an existing project type, as described above, as I obviously don't have InstallShield source code. Also, any links or guidance as to a starting point for doing so would be greatly appreciated.
