Visual Studio, like any Integrated Development Environment, can host extensions for more specialist languages or development tasks. This sort of work is reasonably straightforward most of the time but occasionally you need functionality that isn't available in the APIs. Michal takes two examples, printing code in an editing window, and gaining access to the Visual Studio Notifications, and explains how to hack Visual Studio to get to the functionality.

 public class HandleConcurrencyExceptionAttribute : FilterAttribute, IExceptionFilter
    {
        private PropertyMatchingMode _propertyMatchingMode;
        /// <summary>
        /// This defines when the concurrencyexception happens, 
        /// </summary>
        public enum PropertyMatchingMode
        {
            /// <summary>
            /// Uses only the field names in the model to check against the entity. This option is best when you are using 
            /// View Models with limited fields as opposed to an entity that has many fields. The ViewModel (or model) field names will
            /// be used to check current posted values vs. db values on the entity itself.
            /// </summary>
            UseViewModelNamesToCheckEntity = 0,
            /// <summary>
            /// Use any non-matching value fields on the entity (except timestamp fields) to add errors to the ModelState.
            /// </summary>
            UseEntityFieldsOnly = 1,
            /// <summary>
            /// Tells the filter to not attempt to add field differences to the model state.
            /// This means the end user will not see the specifics of which fields caused issues
            /// </summary>
            DontDisplayFieldClashes = 2
        }


        public HandleConcurrencyExceptionAttribute()
        {
            _propertyMatchingMode = PropertyMatchingMode.UseViewModelNamesToCheckEntity;
        }

        public HandleConcurrencyExceptionAttribute(PropertyMatchingMode propertyMatchingMode)
        {
            _propertyMatchingMode = propertyMatchingMode;
        }


        /// <summary>
        /// The main method, called by the mvc runtime when an exception has occured.
        /// This must be added as a global filter, or as an attribute on a class or action method.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="filterContext"></param>
        public void OnException(ExceptionContext filterContext)
        {
            if (!filterContext.ExceptionHandled && filterContext.Exception is DbUpdateConcurrencyException)
            {
                //Get original and current entity values
                DbUpdateConcurrencyException ex = (DbUpdateConcurrencyException)filterContext.Exception;
                var entry = ex.Entries.Single();
                //problems with ef4.1/4.2 here because of context/model in different projects.
                //var databaseValues = entry.CurrentValues.Clone().ToObject();
                //var clientValues = entry.Entity;
                //So - if using EF 4.1/4.2 you may use this workaround
                var clientValues = entry.CurrentValues.Clone().ToObject();
                entry.Reload();
                var databaseValues = entry.CurrentValues.ToObject();

                List<string> propertyNames;

                filterContext.Controller.ViewData.ModelState.AddModelError(string.Empty, "The record you attempted to edit "
                        + "was modified by another user after you got the original value. The "
                        + "edit operation was canceled and the current values in the database "
                        + "have been displayed. If you still want to edit this record, click "
                        + "the Save button again to cause your changes to be the current saved values.");
                PropertyInfo[] entityFromDbProperties = databaseValues.GetType().GetProperties(BindingFlags.FlattenHierarchy | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance);

                if (_propertyMatchingMode == PropertyMatchingMode.UseViewModelNamesToCheckEntity)
                {
                    //We dont have access to the model here on an exception. Get the field names from modelstate:
                    propertyNames = filterContext.Controller.ViewData.ModelState.Keys.ToList();
                }
                else if (_propertyMatchingMode == PropertyMatchingMode.UseEntityFieldsOnly)
                {
                    propertyNames = databaseValues.GetType().GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public).Select(o => o.Name).ToList();
                }
                else
                {
                    filterContext.ExceptionHandled = true;
                    UpdateTimestampField(filterContext, entityFromDbProperties, databaseValues);
                    filterContext.Result = new ViewResult() { ViewData = filterContext.Controller.ViewData };
                    return;
                }



                UpdateTimestampField(filterContext, entityFromDbProperties, databaseValues);

                //Get all public properties of the entity that have names matching those in our modelstate.
                foreach (var propertyInfo in entityFromDbProperties)
                {

                    //If this value is not in the ModelState values, don't compare it as we don't want
                    //to attempt to emit model errors for fields that don't exist.

                    //Compare db value to the current value from the entity we posted.

                    if (propertyNames.Contains(propertyInfo.Name))
                    {
                        if (propertyInfo.GetValue(databaseValues, null) != propertyInfo.GetValue(clientValues, null))
                        {
                            var currentValue = propertyInfo.GetValue(databaseValues, null);
                            if (currentValue == null || string.IsNullOrEmpty(currentValue.ToString()))
                            {
                                currentValue = "Empty";
                            }

                            filterContext.Controller.ViewData.ModelState.AddModelError(propertyInfo.Name, "Current value: "
                                 + currentValue);
                        }
                    }

                    //TODO: hmm.... how can we only check values applicable to the model/modelstate rather than the entity we saved?
                    //The problem here is we may only have a few fields used in the viewmodel, but many in the entity
                    //so we could have a problem here with that.
                    //object o = propertyInfo.GetValue(myObject, null);
                }

                filterContext.ExceptionHandled = true;

                filterContext.Result = new ViewResult() { ViewData = filterContext.Controller.ViewData };
            }
        }