Visual Studio intellisense extension

Question

I'm using Visual Studio 2022. I'm trying to write my own language extension that does auto complete for a custom language my work uses. I have tried following documentation, videos and chat gpt but cannot get the auto complete to work or for that matter even load the symbols on my code. I have created a class to define an extension and content type

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel.Composition;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Utilities;

namespace OpcenterCoreLanguagePlugin.Types
{
    public class FileAndContentTypeDefinitions
    {
        [Export]
        [Name("CommonLanguageFunction")]
        [BaseDefinition("text")]
        internal static ContentTypeDefinition CommonLanguageFunctionDefinition;

        [Export]
        [ContentType("CommonLanguageFunction")]
        [FileExtension(".clf")]
        internal static FileExtensionToContentTypeDefinition CommonLanguageFunctionTypeDefinition;
    }
}

Then I created a source provider using this code:

[Export(typeof(ICompletionSourceProvider))]
[ContentType("CommonLanguageFunction")]
[Name("CLFAutoComplete")]

and completion handler

[Export(typeof(IVsTextViewCreationListener))]
[Name("CLFcompletionhandler")]
[ContentType("CommonLanguageFunction")]
[TextViewRole(PredefinedTextViewRoles.Editable)]

My problem is that the symbols don't even seem to load for the actual code of these classes. I have no included the code because I don't think it is necessarily relevant. I'm just trying to get a static list of strings to display before i start writing the actual logic.

Are there additional steps I am missing? I can't seem to find anything else I'm supposed to do.

I have implemented the following interfaces in my project:

IOleCommandTarget
IVsTextViewCreationListener
ICompletionSource 
ICompletionSourceProvider

I largely copied the code out of the Visual Studio instructions here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/walkthrough-displaying-statement-completion?view=vs-2022&tabs=csharp#create-a-mef-project.

Just to see if I could get it working before I strip out their code and replace it with my own.

I was trying to create my own editor for a custom file type of .clf and have it auto complete when I type a letter.

Answer 1

Turned out that i had to mark the project as a MEF component in my vsix file for the classes to get read. took a long time to find that information.