How to capture the mouse click event in VS2008 by ENVDTE?

Question

I'm writing an add-on (by the format of VSPackage) for Visual Studio. One of the designed feature is: when user left-clicks in the area of text editor or presses up or down key to move to a new line, the add-on can capture this event and then do something (It's similar as the "VA Outline" feature in Visual Assist, when you clicks to a new line, the corresponding element will be highlighted in VA Outline tool window).

The problem I meet is: I can't find any API in Visual Studio Shell or other SDK that supports the Mouse-level event (The Envdte80 namespace supplies an event named "TextDocumentKeyPressEvents" which can be used for keyboard-level event). Does somebody get a solution to this? Many thanks in advance:-)

Answer 1

There is no direct way to do so in Visual Studio extensibility. But you can use native WinAPI (from C++ or C# extensibility package) to set a global mouse hook - this will give you ability to intercept mouse clicks. You can than filter click, get caret position in text editor etc from within your extensibility package.