AllenD's WebLog

Nice Video on Standard Dependency Graphs in VS 2010 Ultimate

AllenD — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:57:00 GMT

Chris Lovett posted a video on using the Dependency Graphs feature of VS 2010 on his blog: http://www.lovettsoftware.com/blogengine.net/.

VS 2010 Beta2 has been launched

AllenD — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:02:00 GMT

Check out the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 page on MSDN.

I added a countdown control which links to the "Ultimate Offer" - check it out.

What is 'Progression'?

AllenD — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:48:00 GMT

I've been working on Progression for the past 2 years, but there's not a very good definition that's been made public about it. Let me attempt to describe the feature here. It's been talked about in a few different ways by Cameron Skinner in his blog and on stage at Tech*Ed as well as some videos on Channel 9, but let me try to give a complete description here.

Why the name 'Progression'?

First the name 'Progression'. Progression attempts to aid in the evolution of software, hence the name 'Progression'. It's kind of a code-name, but more than that when you think about how software progresses over time. These tools aim to aid in the discovery of how software progresses and aid in the decision making that developers and architects make to advance (i.e. progress) their software in the future.

At it's heart Progression is a directed graph. The directed graph is very flexible in that it simply contains Nodes and Links (vertices and edges in some nomenclature). Graphs can be used to depict just about any kind of relationship between Nodes. It's the classification of the Nodes and Links that give the graph some meaning. Graphs can contain nodes for people, animals, pharmaceuticals, institutions, families, species, geographies, planets, molecules, etc. When it comes to understanding a conceptual model of software a graph might contains nodes for computers, applications, assemblies, classes, methods, files, projects, solutions, etc. Graphs can contain links for relationships between the nodes. In the case of people, links can be used to indicate relationships such as parent/child, manager/employee, coworkers, neighbors, etc. In sociology these relationships between people are the basis for the science of groups of people. For software, graphs can contain links for relationships such as Contains (assembly contains a class, for instance, or class contain a method), calls (method calls method, for instance), references (for assemblies that reference another assembly and therefore need that assembly to be available at load-time). Progression attempts to bring the science of networks to software itself.

Progression collects and manages such data about software projects. Now one of the really cool things about Progression is that it isn't limited to software. Under the covers it could manipulate any kind of directed graph (like a social network described above). But the team creating Progression isn't just passionate about directed graphs, we're really excited to solve certain software development challenges. So the sweet spot for the features in Progression is all about software.

Progression provides some user interface elements to expose this data to developers and architects in a way that they can use to help them solve software development problems.

What are some of the problems that Progression allows the developer/architect to solve?

First is Architectural Discovery. This is the concept where a developer is introduced to a new code base and needs to understand how it works under the covers. Progression provides many different ways to display and explore the data in the graph of code, assemblies, classes, methods, etc. It's the visualization of these elements that allows the developer to see a big picture and dive into details in order to learn how things related and work together (hopefully well, but sometimes not very well at all!).

The second problems that Progression solves is allowing the user to browse rich unending data. Directed graphs can have cycles. Directed graphs can also be used to hold just about any kind of data. Progression provides a tool to browse such information in a tabular way that allows expansing and navigation even in the face of cycles and data that seemingly never ends. We've done a lot of work to enable this kind of flexibility in a general purpose tool.

With these tools one can answer questions like: What are my unused pieces of code? What are the cyclic dependencies in my code? What are the important hubs in my system?

Real software, not slide-ware

Progression isn't very interested in simply documenting the architecture of a system as a communications mechanism. There are plenty of documents, modeling languages, power-point and visio features that can be used to draw a model of a system. They all can be used without any code at all being in existence. These things can be really useful, but that's not what Progression is about. Progression, instead, conveys the actual software architecture based on reverse engineering binaries and sniffing out code as it's being written. It works very deeply with the Visual Studio development environment and the CLR/.Net Framework to get the information it conveys. As such it's a reflection of the actual code, not a conceptual model that gets stale quickly after coding begins. Used in conjunction with modeling tools, Progression provides the linkage to actual implementation to verify the implementation against the conceptual design. This provides an 'as-is' versus 'to-be' kind of question. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could walk up to an implementation and design document and have a tool that tells you where the implementation and the intended design differ. That's what Progression enables. In this first version (VS 2010) we're just scratching the surface. We've got some amazing capabilities that we'll deliver in coming releases.

You should stay tuned to try out VS 2010 Beta2 in order to see if Progression (and a lot of other cool features) can help you with these kinds of questions.

I'll provide more details in the future.

Beta2 of VS2010 is almost ready

AllenD — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:52:00 GMT

The Progression team has been hard at work getting the final touches on the Beta2 release of VS 2010. It'll be out in a couple of months.

If you have Beta1, Beta2 will be a significant improvement in performance and reliability. Great stuff coming online. Stay tuned.

Aloha Oahu

AllenD — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:12:00 GMT

In late January I boarded a plane with my family and one-way ticket to Seattle.

Yes, the family and I are moving back to Seattle. We spent almost 2 years in Honolulu and loved almost every minute of it. Great experiences, nice weather, fabulous beaches, snorkeling. I even learned to surf. Ok, well, I took a lesson in Waikiki.

But alas, it was time for wife and children to get back to some friends we haven't seen in a long time. Life in paradise has a price and finding a place where the dollar stretched further was high on our list to accomplish.

I miss myHawaii friends, but am happy to be facing a new chapter in life. Did I mention that it snowed in Seattle yesterday? I miss the good Hawaii weather a little too.

As for work...

The Progression team is hard at work stabilizing the Rosario release for Beta 1. We can't wait to get feedback on this really cool release of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System.

Stay tuned for more on Beta1 soon....

Aloha,

Allen

Architecture Explorer and Directed Graph Document video

AllenD — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:32:00 GMT

Check out Suhail Dutta's Channel 9 video/demo of the Architecture Explorer and DGML documents. He starts with Directed Graph via the Architecture Explorer then goes into the Sequence Designer (generating UML sequences from code) and Layer Designer (validating design intent against implementation). These two feature both heavily depend upon the Architecture Explorer's data model (a directed graph of the software artifacts and their relationships) to peer into the code and surmise the high-level information being presented. He even shows the command line version of Layer Validation via MSBuild.

The VS 2010 cat is peeking it's head out the bag - so to speak

AllenD — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 04:22:00 GMT

Check out the article on VS 2010. The screen shot there is my feature! The new Architecture Explorer and features related to it have been my main focus for the last 18 months. It's great to see it getting more light of day.

A longer article contains a link to a better image.

All week this week you can check out the Channel 9 coverage of the recent VS 2010 information at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010-Week-on-Channel-9. Tomorrow is 'Architecture Day' with Cameron Skinner. Don't miss it!

I'll certainly be sharing more details as I can, but remember that PDC 2008 is the place to go for all the good details first, including Hand-on-labs with running bits, keynotes and lectures with juicy details and demo's in the pavillion including folks from the development team you can chat with. (I won't be there this year, but look for some folks standing in for me in the VS Team System area.)

Back on Oahu

AllenD — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:32:00 GMT

After a nice week in Redmond (weather was great through Wed, but turned nasty Thu - Sat) I'm back home in Honolulu. The company meeting was a great experience once again. I always get a charge out of seeing how big Microsoft is in terms of financial success, but more importantly our impact on the world of software and technology. We saw some really great demos of future products and features. The whole team from here in Hawaii attended.

The week was chock full of meetings to plan out the next few months. It's hard to feel productive when it's just all talk. I'd rather be writing code, fixing bugs. But the product plan is nice to have and I can't wait to tell you more soon. Stay tuned after PDC for more on this blog about what I've been working on.

On a personal note, I completed the Basic Keelboat sailing certification course. I'm now certified to take a small boat daysailing. Can't wait to do that. The only problem is that Oahu doesn't have boats for rent to the general public. Plenty of Yacht clubs for boat owners and plenty of charters for large boats (crewed mostly - not a lot of bareboat activity in Hawaii), but nothing in the 20-26' range that I can take out for a few hours. I'll keep looking though.

What's up with Allen

AllenD — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:27:00 GMT

I can't believe it's been a year without blogging. That's got to change... starting today.

If you've read my blog in the past you know that I moved to Hawai'i in May of 2007. While still with Microsoft I helped to get a small office opened up in Honolulu, HI. We're working on tools that ship with VS Team System Architecture Edition. I wish I could talk about the details, but the handlers around here are keeping it all under wraps until PDC2008. I wish I was going this year, but alas the travel schedule was a little too packed. But I'm still quite happy to know that the features me and my team have been working on will be discussed, demo'd and there is a session one can attend to see how VS Team Architect is shaping up for the future. As that gets closer I'll blog more.

On a personal note...

In the last year I've not cut my hair. If you know me you know that I've worn a flat-top haircut for years and so most people that see me for the first time are quite shocked at hair that is down past my shoulders. In the last year I've also gotten to enjoy one of the most beautiful places on the planet and tried my hand at surfing and the ukelele. Surfing could use some work, but playing the ukelele is coming along great. My most recent personal project is learning to sail. Lessons last Sat and this on Puget Sound.

I'm in Redmond this week along with the rest of the office from Hawaii. We're doing some product planning with the larger team and also attending the company meeting on Thu.

I'm going to try to come by the VSIP annual conference here on Microsoft's campus if I can make it.

Stay tuned...

Please stay tuned for more great things as we lift the covers, somewhat, off the next release of Visual Studio and other platforms/technologies from Microsoft.

Orcas first, then Rosario

AllenD — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 08:02:00 GMT

In case you are unaware, we're close to shipping Visual Studio 2008 (aka "Orcas"). I hope that's not really a suprise.

A bit of trivia on the code name "Orcas". When when VS 2003 came out the code name was "Everett". Everett is the name of a town just north and west of Redmond, Microsoft's headquarters. If you drew a roughly straight line on a map from Redmond through Everett extending further North and West you'd be in the proximity of things like Camano Island, Whidbey Island, and Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. Whidbey was the codename of the VS 2005 release. Orcas Island is another one of the islands in this area of the map and that's why VS 2008 is codenamed "Orcas".

There's a follow-on product to VS 2008 to update a bunch of tools in the Team System family of Visual Studio tools including some new tools. This release is code named "Rosario". Rosario Resort happens be a very nice area on Orcas Island. If you ever travel to the Pacific Northwest and want to visit a first rate resort with excellent accomodation, entertainment and food, Rosario Resort is a great place to visit. Rosario will also be a great release of tools from Microsoft.

So, with that bit of trivia behind us...

I'll be in Redmond the week of 10/15 for the VSIP Summit taking place that week. I'll be presenting info on what I've been working on here is the Hawaii Development Center. If you are at the summit, please say hello.

We plan to put what I've been working on into the CTP of Rosario that will be coming out in the next month or so. If you happen to be on the distribution of that preview, I'd love your feedback on the release. More details to come in the next few weeks...

Aloha VS SDK

AllenD — Mon, 14 May 2007 18:25:00 GMT

I've been working in the VS Extensibility area for quite a few years now. But the time is right for me to venture forth into a new area of responsibility for Microsoft.

I'll be helping to form a new team based in Honolulu, Hawai'i, USA. Microsoft is opening the Hawaii Development Center there and I'm one of the most fortunate individuals on the planet to share in the experience. In the future, I'll be blogging about the HDC and this new project so stay tuned for more info on both of these areas. I'll be redesigning my blog appearance to reflect a more tropical attitude, but the address will remain the same.

So, I won't be in Redmond any longer (as of Friday 5/18). We recently held a VSIP Developer Conference and I was a little nostalgic helping to host my last Dev Lab (as they used to be called). I've also gotten to know some of you via trade shows like Tech*Ed and the PDC; I don't know if I'll be able to join you in those shows in the future, but I hope so depending on what content we have to offer from this new project.

It's truly been a pleasure to work with the VSIP partner community and the VS SDK team over these last few years. I'm extremely pleased with the VS SDK we provide and most of that pleasure comes from the great feedback we've received from the VSIP partner community. There's certainly more that can be done in the product and making extensibility easier is one of the main goals of the team. It's great to see how many people are getting involved with VS extensibility and how the general VSIP community is growing; helping one another along the way. It's been great working on the VS core product and helping so many VS SDK users to extend VS in so many interesting ways.

The VS SDK is in good hands. My change of focus provides an opportunity for the rest of the team to shine. They've always been providing the awesome SDK you consume anyway and I've been lucky to have worked with them. The plans for the Orcas VS SDK are solid and the energy the team is putting into the product and the ecosystem is awesome. The future is very bright for the VSIP community.

I wish you success in your VS extensibility endeavors.

Mahalo,

Allen

Check out the VS SDK for VS "Orcas" Beta1

AllenD — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:36:00 GMT

Last week we released the VS SDK for VS "Orcas" Beta1. You can use this lastest version of the SDK to build VS Integration packages and DSL Tools-based packages that target VS "Orcas" Beta1.

To get this version of the VS SDK requires access to the http://www.vsipmembers.com site.

James Lau blogged some of the details of this release.

Please check it out and provide feedback. The best way to provide feedback is via the Visual Studio section in the Microsoft Feedback Center on MSDN. You can use this link to access the specific area for Visual Studio feedback.

If you'd like to discuss the VS SDK or have questions about VS Extensibility, the best place to go for online help is the Extensibility forum on MSDN.

RDT changes in VS Orcas

AllenD — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 19:15:00 GMT

The Running Document Table is used in VS to control the state of opened documents. This is only accessible via interfaces exposed in the VSSDK and the VS Automation Model. End-users only see the effects of the RDT in places like the dialog that pops up asking the user if they'd like to save changes before closing the IDE.

The underlying implementation in previous version of VS had some problems with reentrancy protection being inconsistent. Additionally various entry points weren't very robust with error handling (some would crash, other return error results, etc).

One of the excellent developers in the Developer Tools Platform team responsible for the base VS platform took it upon himself to make a clean sweep through this area of the codebase and came up with a number of improvements. He sent me a document with the changes that he thought the 3rd party community might be impacted by. I wanted to share that information with you.

One important point to make here is that the interface methods of IVsRunningDocumentTable have not changed. Binary compatibility is preserved so you don't have to worry about your code not compiling in Orcas. If you don't use that interfaces in any way, then you don't have to worry about this at all. But if you do use the RDT interfaces, then you need to check your code on how you interacted with the RDT to see if any of these changes affect your runtime behavior.

Here's a synopsis of an email thread that discusses the changes introduced in VS Orcas. These changes were available in the Sept 2006 CTP of VS (and all susquent versions).

Thread affinity for the RDT has been tightened. With the exception of the following methods, all RDT interface methods must be called on the main thread, else RPC_E_WRONG_THREAD will be returned:

GetDocumentInfo

FindAndLockDocument (with RDT_NoLock)

FindAndLockDocumentEx (with RDT_NoLock, as long as the document exists and has a hierarchy/itemid)

FindOrRegisterAndLockDocument (with RDT_NoLock, as long as the document exists and has a hierarchy/itemid)

GetRunningDocumentsEnum

All methods on IEnumRunningDocuments.

This restriction was only inconsistently applied in previous versions.

The externally-visible change in behavior for the RDT will include, but is not limited to, the following:

· The RDT lock will be faithfully acquired on any call into the RDT. This is handled sloppily in the RDT in previous versions, and more rigorous treatment of the RDT lock has the potential for introducing deadlock where none existed in previous versions.

· The RDT lock will not be held when calling out of the RDT. This also has the potential of causing deadlock where none existed in previous versions.

· Interfaces held by the RDT will be released (i.e. not leaked) for documents left in the RDT when it is destroyed. This only happens on shutdown, so this should be a no-op for packages.

· IVsRunningDocumentTable::RegisterAndLockDocument will require an IVsHierarchy when a document is registered with an edit lock. The documentation specifies this, but the code did not enforce it. There are several other code paths where this invariant can be violated as well. Increasing enforcement could be an issue for packages.

· IVsRunningDocumentTable::UnlockDocument will not allow unlocking of a lock if a lock of the specified type is not held. In previous versions you can UnlockDocument(RDT_EditLock) even though you never acquired an edit lock. Fixing this could be an issue for packages as well.

What is the new behavior if the call is made and the type of lock specified is not held? The following code illustrates the differences:

pRDT->RegisterAndLockDocument (RDT_EditLock, ..., &cookie);

pRDT->UnlockDocument (RDT_ReadLock, cookie);

pRDT->GetDocumentInfo (cookie, ..., &cReadLocks, &cEditLocks, ...);
pRDT->UnlockDocument (RDT_EditLock, cookie);

In previous versions, the Unlock(RDT_ReadLock) would return S_OK, the GetDocumentInfo would return cReadLocks=0xFFFFFFFF and cEditLocks=1. After the Unlock(RDT_EditLock), the document is still in the RDT (visible to enumerators, etc.).

In VS Orcas, the behavior will change so Unlock(RDT_ReadLock) will return failure, meaning GetDocumentInfo will correctly return cReadLocks=0 and cEditLocks=1. After the Unlock(RDT_EditLock), the document is no longer in the RDT, event sinks have gotten OnAfterLastUnlock, etc.

· IVsRunningDocumentTable::UnregisterDocumentLockHolder will AV with an invalid cookie. The fix would turn the AV into an E_INVALIDARG. This should present no issues for packages.

· Documents enumerated by IEnumRunningDocuments will be enumerated in a different order. There is no order expressed or implied by the interface definition, and the current order is based on the hash of the document name so it’s unlikely that the current behavior is stable enough for a package to have dependencies on it, but it’s theoretically possible.

MPPG/MPLEX runtime DLL not needed

AllenD — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 10:39:00 GMT

I was recently alerted to an email sent to Soma (Vice President leading the Microsoft Developer Division) about a problem with the VS SDK's MPPG/MPLEX tools.

Here's the question:

After installing VS SDK (feb 2007) and trying to play with the managed parser generator (MPPG/MPLEX), it seems that the MPPGRuntime.dll, discussed in the documentation and needed to use the output from the command line tools, is missing.

I've searched the whole installation of the VS SDK and looked in the GAC without success.

Can you point me to the appropriate contact to help me resolve this issue?

The dll mentioned (MPPGRuntime.dll) doesn't actually ship. It's an error in the documentation that it is mentioned. I'm working on getting the documentation issue addressed in a future release.

Originally the code in the runtime dll was used both by the tools (MPLEX, specifically) and the generated code. If this had continued to be the case, then a generated parser would not work at all without the dll. The dll would be required to be redistributed with the parser. This complicates things because if Microsoft supplies a dll that a 3rd party ships, then Microsoft is responsible to service the dll. So, now we're talking about an MSI that would be chained together with the parser installer.

To simplify deployment and servicing complexity, I removed the dll and instead placed the code into MPLEX directly. Additionally, because the generated code needed the functionality, we shipped the source code in the Managed Babel folder of the VS SDK. (See the sample in the Example.ManagedMyC folder for details.)

So, there's no need for a runtime dll and you can use the tools to generate a language service with much simpler deployment.

Talk to you later on,

Allen

VS SDK 4.0 is available for download

AllenD — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:58:00 GMT

On behalf of the VS Tools Ecosystem team, I am pleased to announce that after months of hard work, VS SDK 4.0 has been released! This is the last SDK release planned for Visual Studio 2005. The team has done a ton of work to make this release friendly to developers who are new to Visual Studio extensibility. It is available for immediate download on the Microsoft Download Center.

Some of the new features included in this release:

VS SDK Browser – the new entry-point to the entire SDK; includes new QuickStart Tutorials and a completely revamped sample browsing experience, community resources and tools info
Package Load Analyzer – allows you to easily diagnose package load failures
Toolbox Installer redistributable package – allows component vendors to simplify deployment, along with a sample demonstrating how to do it all.
Sandcastle – new set of tools for generating managed class library documentation

There's an article in eWeek for this release. (That's a first for the SDK as far as I know.)