I've been trying to do something similar, and have come up with the following, which simply searches through namespaces and classes until it hits the one you're looking for.
It seems to work in most cases although when encountering a partial class it will only return the first hit, and as it's a model of the file it will only have the members contained in that file. Still figuring out what to do about that.
This comes from a T4 template and is using T4 Toolkit (which is where TransformationContext comes from) so if you're not using that, just get a hold of a project element and pass Project.CodeModel.CodeElements to the recursive FindClass method.
Example usage would be FindClass("MyCompany.DataClass");
private CodeClass FindClass(string className)
{
return FindClass(TransformationContext.Project.CodeModel.CodeElements, className);
}
private CodeClass FindClass(CodeElements elements, string className)
{
foreach (CodeElement element in elements)
{
if(element is CodeNamespace || element is CodeClass)
{
CodeClass c = element as CodeClass;
if (c != null && c.Access == vsCMAccess.vsCMAccessPublic)
{
if(c.FullName == className)
return c;
CodeClass subClass = FindClass(c.Members, className);
if(subClass!= null)
return subClass;
}
CodeNamespace ns = element as CodeNamespace;
if(ns != null)
{
CodeClass cc = FindClass(ns.Members, className);
if(cc != null)
return cc;
}
}
}
return null;
}