Issue with Options Page after VS2015 migration

Question

I work on a commercial application that is developed using Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility projects. In this application we have a custom Options Page that holds application related properties. We started migrating our application to visual studio 2015. Most of the migration seems to have gone through well except for a few issues. Once of them is that in VS 2010, on opening an instance of our application, registry entries are created (automatically by the .NET framework) for all the properties managed by the custom options page under a custom registry entry path that is maintained in the .pkgdef and .pkgdef.installer files. However this doesn't happen after migration to VS 2015. On opening an instance of the application or even during debugging, no registries are created and this is causing us problems.

I am not sure if I am missing anything, since the registry entries are supposed to be automatically created under the specified path. Is there a change in the way the options page properties are stored in VS 2015?

PS: For confidential reasons I might not be able to add application related images. I will try to provide as much information as possible if required.

Answer 1

Hi Suhas Proyadarshan,

Please update registration attributes, which is like:

[PackageRegistration(UseManagedResourcesOnly = true)]  
[Guid("0B81D86C-0A85-4f30-9B26-DD2616447F95")]  
public sealed class BasicPackage : Package  
{. . .}

And what is your .net framework version? I'm afraid it is caused by the old version of .net framework. Please refer here:

Best Regards,

Dylan

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Answer 2

Hi Suhas,

How exactly is your extension installed? Is it installed through a custom installer (.MSI), or is your extension packaged and installed through a .VSIX?

It sounds as if the registry settings in your .pkgdef were not properly merged into the VS 2015 registry hive. Can you confirm whether or not the registry settings are present?

If you are installing via a custom .MSI, where/how do you place the .pkgdef file(s), and do you run the devenv.exe with /setup to ensure the .pkgdef and other resources are properly merged with devenv?

Can you give us more details on how your package gets registered, and the steps taken to port it to VS 2015? 

Sincerely,

---

Ed Dore

Answer 3

Hi Ed,

How exactly is your extension installed? Is it installed through a custom installer (.MSI), or is your extension packaged and installed through a .VSIX?
The extension is installed through a custom .MSI file.

It sounds as if the registry settings in your .pkgdef were not properly merged into the VS 2015 registry hive. Can you confirm whether or not the registry settings are present?
The registry settings are present in our .pkgdef file. 

If you are installing via a custom .MSI, where/how do you place the .pkgdef file(s), and do you run the devenv.exe with /setup to ensure the .pkgdef and other resources are properly merged with devenv?
The .pkgdef file is placed in the application installation folder.
Our Application is an isolated shell application. We are not sure if running devenv.exe with /setup is relevant for our problem. Please correct me if I'm wrong. 

Can you give us more details on how your package gets registered, and the steps taken to port it to VS 2015? 
We used the basic instructions provided in this link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/how-to-migrate-extensibility-projects-to-visual-studio-2015?view=vs-2015.

Please let us know if you need any more information.

Thanks and regards,

Suhas