AllenD's WebLog : VS SDK

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.

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.)

V4 SDK (almost) ready!

AllenD — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 03:29:00 GMT

We're putting the final touches on the v4 VS SDK for VS 2005.

The team and I have been hard at work ensuring it is at a high level of quality. The content is out of this world. There's a few new samples to start with, a new SDK browser connecting you to community resources as well as sample content, tutorials, documentation and tools. There's a Package Load Analyzer tool than can help with Package Load Failure and other package load issues you might encounter in testing and production environments. There's also a Toolbox Controls Installer package, sample code and documentation (including a tutorial) for control vendors to see how we recommend integrating controls into the VS toolsbox. Note: The Toolbox Controls Installer is expected to be in the next release of VS (aka Orcas) so any code that works with v4 of the SDK and V2005 should work without little or no change in Orcas.

Keep your eyes on this blog in the coming days for the release announcement...

VS SDK v4 Product Backlog is ready for public review

AllenD — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 03:13:00 GMT

Below I've pasted the VS SDK Product Backlog for version 4 of the VS SDK. We're planning to ship this version of the VS SDK in mid-December. This will be the last revision of the VS SDK that supports VS 2005. We'd love to get some feedback on these features and work items.

The major areas of focus for V4 are to

enable community collaboration,
ease component vendor pain,
improve the user experience getting started with the VS SDK and
get a start on some VS Orcas platform and SDK work.

Those themes drove the decisions we've made so far, but we need feedback from VS SDK users to ensure we are driving toward a successful release for V4, so please don't be shy about letting us know what you think of our plan. There is, of course, much more we'd like to do, but have to combine a lot of competing priorities and limited resources in order to come up with the best update we can for this time-frame. Your feedback helps us to understand how best to compromise on priorities and align resources.

Category	Priority	Feature
Doc	10	Documentation Tech Reviews I
Infrastructure	20	Checkin suites coverage improvements
Infrastructure	20	Code Coverage Improvements I
Community	20	Community Content Plan (Forum Sweep)
Other Features	20	General Bug Fixing I
Community	25	Community Content Plan (Forum Ownership)
Component Vendor	25	Component Vendor Web Control
Component Vendor	25	Component Vendor Windows Forms Control
Power Toys	25	Ship Source Outliner power toy code for community collaboration
Component Vendor	26	Component Vendor Setup
Component Vendor	27	Component Vendor Toolbox
Community	30	Community Content Plan (Webcast, Screencast)
Iron Python	30	Event generation
Iron Python	30	IP Language Service - Code window dropdowns Webcast
Test	30	Orcas VS PIA redist testing
Other Features	30	Project Aggregator 2 fixes in Orcas
Power Toys	30	Ship power toys more broadly (not just in VS SDK)
Better OOBE	30	Update Sample Browser Spec
Community	40	Community Content Plan (Blogs)
Other Features	40	General Bug Fixing II
Better OOBE	40	Getting Started Docs
Orcas	40	Orcas SDK - Ship with Orcas CTP's
Partner Content	40	Test Adapter Sample (VS IDE Host)
Test	40	Vista GDR (Beta)
Test	40	Whidbey SP1 (RTM)
Community	42	Community Content Plan (Team Chat 30 min)
Better OOBE	43	Update Setup
Component Vendor	45	Component Vendor Help Integration
Community	45	Connect VS SDK user to community shared source for PowerToys and other projects
Component Vendor	50	Component Vendor Component Versioning
Doc	55	Integrate Documentation Tools into SDK
Samples	60	Nested Project Sample (update from Archive folder)
Other Features	60	Project Systems/VSRegEx - Cloning Templates Fix
Iron Python	70	IP Project - BrowseWith context menu for HTML project items
Other Features	70	Project System Base Classes - Cancel build
Other Features	99	Dynamic Project Flavor Sample
Test	99	PPE testing of Orcas
Other Features	99	Setup/Deployment of Packages via Deployment Projects
Other Features	99	Update MenuAndCommands ref samples for ComboBox command type
Infrastructure	100	Code Coverage Improvements II
Doc	100	Documentation Tech Reviews II

VS SDK on Vista

AllenD — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 18:28:00 GMT

I've finally gotten around to trying out the VS SDK on Vista with UAC turned on. Here's what I had to do to get the VS SDK to install, and a package to compile and run:

1) Installing VS - fairly straightforward, no surprises

2) Installing VS SDK - the self-extracing exe fails to launch setup.exe and the system pops up an ugly message box indicating that setup.exe can't be started. Solution: run the self-extracing exe with the '-x' switch and specify a directory to extract to. Run setup.exe from the specified directory. You'll need to enter admin credentials in order to complete the setup, but it should be straightforward.

3) VS SDK installs all of its content directly to the Program Files folder and folder is restricted in Vista. Opening a sample and attempting to build it results in errors about the output directories.

Solution:

a) Copy all of the VisualStudioIntegration\Samples folder to your personal documents folder (on my system it's c:\users\allend\documents). I placed my copy of the sample code into the Visual Studio 2005 \ Projects \ VSSDKSamples directory.

Moving the sample files around breaks them because there are relative references to other files (relative means the directories are specified with '..' to move up the directory from the current path). These references are now broken. As a matter of fact when you open a sample solution the project will fail to load (you'll get an error message).

Solution:

b) Right-click on the project file in the Solution Explorer of VS. Replace all strings like '..\..\..\..\Common' with 'c:\Program Files\Visual Studio 2005 SDK\2006.04\VisualStudioIntegration\Common'. This will make the references to the files absolute instead of relative.

c) You can do the same with the Overview.xml file that comes with the sample.

d) Try building the sample now. It should build. If not, continue to look for relative file paths and fix them up.

Registration is still a problem. The sample build causes regpkg to run, but it places it's values in a virtual registry location that devenv.exe doesn't actually look at when looking for registered packages.

Solution:

e) Registration - for now you'll have to do it by hand - you can use the /regfile option of regpkg to create the file, then you should be good to go. Native package will have to do something similar, but there's no tool to create a .reg file out of the rgs data in the native resources. Once you have a .reg file, remember to run the command prompt (or regedit.exe) as an administrator. Running as a normal user and importing .reg files causes errors to be reported and registry entires aren't actually put in place. I did this by spawning a command prompt as Adminstrator in the Vista start menu.

Running:

e) Close the solution and reopen - in the previous open of the solution the VS SDK solution extender didn't work to place the debug information into the sample (for automatically configuring what should happen on F5 - Debug Launch). Closing and reopening the solution makes the debug info work properly.

f) Get "DevEnv /setup /root Exp" to run after you registered your package by hand. This will at least get the menus to be recognized for your package. The easiest way to do this is to touch your .ctc file, getting it to rebuild will trigger the setup step to occur.

I know the instructions above are really involved and there's a bunch of stuff that should be done automatically, but unfortunately the VS SDK for Whidbey wasn't built for this. Until we make some changes to the tools and samples this is the best I can offer.

Good luck,

Allen

TechEd 2006 - Power To the Pros - Boston

AllenD — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 02:55:00 GMT

I'll be at TechEd this year. Please stop by the VS Extensibility booth for info on extending Visual Studio and the VSIP Partner Program.

I'll try to blog often to give a perspective about the event and the activities that are planned. I'm already tired just thinking about the calendar.

VS SDK V3 Starts Today

AllenD — Mon, 01 May 2006 20:20:00 GMT

We begin version 3 of the VS SDK supporting VS 2005 today! Over the last few weeks after releasing V2 of the VS SDK, the VS SDK team has been planning the V3 release. I've posted a list below of all the things we wanted to investigate for possible inclusion in the V3 release. All of the features have costs (implementation, documentation, testing, etc) and it comes down to priority and available resources if a feature makes it into the SDK.

We'd love your feedback on our plans. If you see something that doesn't make sense to you, please let us know. The priority listed below is the planning priority (how important it was to plan the feature or infrastructure improvement), not the delivery priority (how important it is to deliver a feature or infrastructure improvement). When the delivery priority has been determined (always subject to change, of course), we'll let you know.

Planning Priority	Feature Item
0	Infrastructure - Release tools checkin automation
5	Infrastructure - MSI building/signing steps
10	.Net managed language integration tools
10	Integrate DSL Final Toolkit
10	Test Adapter Sample (VS IDE Host)
10	Update SDM content
10	Update TFS content
10	Update VSTS Developer Edition Content
10	Update VSTS Test Edition content
10	Use DevDiv MadDog/SourceDepot sync'g
15	Addressing Bugs that are preventing 100% test pass %
15	Wizard template updates ( Editor and other improvements )
20	Code Coverage Improvements
20	Orcas Enabling tests to run on Orcas
20	Orcas SDK - Convert 1 sample to Orcas
20	Orcas SDK - Infrastructure - Setup refactoring into Platform and SDK components
20	Orcas SDK start-up
20	Orcas Setup Arch
20	Partner Team Process Document Update
20	Sample Browser - Color improvements
20	Sample Browser - logo bitmap low-res
20	Servicing for Project Aggregator 2
20	Team Process Document Update
20	Web Project sample phase 1
20	Web Project sample phase 2
20	Web Project sample phase 3
20	Web Project sample phase 4
25	All appropriate Testing in Exp hive instead of regular
30	“How to integrate with VS” for external SDKs sample phase 1
30	“How to integrate with VS” for external SDKs sample phase 2
30	IP - icons
30	IP - splash screen
30	Orcas SDK - Whidbey Samples - DDSuites
30	Whidbey SP1 SDK work
40	Community - Channel 9
40	Enable code gallery contributions to sample browser
40	Investigate cloning, starter kit or templates for Package samples
40	Project System Base Classes - Cancel build
40	Project System Base Classes - Features
40	Project System Base Classes - Persisted Properties in User files
40	Project system reference sample C#
40	Project system reference sample C++
40	Project Systems/VSRegEx - Cloning Templates Fix
40	Redistribute Help2.0/Dexplore
40	Sample Browser - keyword search
50	Adding Overviews to Archive Samples
50	Adding Samples to Sample Browser
50	Additional Contractor Powertoys
50	Additional Contractor Samples
50	Infrastructure - Setup refactoring into functional area components for change isolation
50	Release tool Cleanup - reduce potentially objectionable phrases exemptions
50	Rolling build system improvements or VSTS dogfooding for CI build
50	VSTS Dogfood
55	IronPython - Investigate cost of implementing refactoring commands (Rename, Extract method, etc)
60	IP Language Service - Code window dropdowns
60	IP Language Service - Collapsible Regions
60	IP Language Service - Smart Indenting
60	IP Language Service - Smart Tags
60	Namespace.exe converted to Whidbey razzle build
60	Setup Refactoring
60	Text marker explorer sample
70	Infrastructure - Testing Tool Integration
70	Setup improvements for caching MSI's
70	SQL reporting services
70	VS Package Item Wizard
90	Update Orcas Package Wizards to use VSCT
90	Wizard UI Framework

VS SDK V2 Has Been Released

AllenD — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 01:43:00 GMT

I'm proud to announce the availability of the V2 VS SDK supporting VS 2005. This SDK is awesome. It has some incredible sample content including Iron Python language integration including WinForms Designer integration. By examining the Iron Python source code (not included in the SDK, but free) you can see how a language can integration into VS in a rich deep way.

If you noticed, we anticipated our release to be shipped on 4/7, but we held back the release for additional verification and examination to ensure it was the best we could ship. Some of the components were built with the VS 2005 RTM build and that raised a few flags with folks that wanted those components to be built with newer build rules. In the end, we changed a few components and others remained the same. The net result is that you have the best SDK we could ship.

Enjoy!

(And please provide feedback for future SDK's.)

VS SDK (Oct 2005) for VS 2005 now posted

AllenD — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 22:00:00 GMT

I'm very pleased to announce the availability of the Visual Studio SDK for Visual Studio 2005.

VSIP members can now download the VS SDK for the VS 2005 product (which was recently posted for MSDN subscribers). This is the SDK necessary to build integrations into Visual Studio 2005.

Please note that the VSIPDev.com redirects you to a new site which has been modified significantly from the original (it uses Passport for identity management, for instance). Don't be surprised by the changes. Everything is still there, it's just been reorganized.

We'll have updates to this SDK in the near future and they are intended to work side-by-side with released SDK's so you can look forward to new samples, tools and libraries in the future. The SDK team put in a lot of work over the last several months to get this SDK ready for release. We hope you like it. If you see any problems or have suggestions, please visit the Product Feedback Center on MSDN to provide feedback.

PDC Day 3 - Experts, experts, everywhere

AllenD — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 09:24:00 GMT

C# Futures was packed...

So I ended up in an overflow room. Listening to Anders Hejlsberg talk about delegates, anonymous methods, lambda expressions, generics, etc. was very cool. It's really interesting all the things that needed to be done to the C# language in order to make the LINQ (Language Integrated Query) syntax work.

Dynamic Languages in the CLR...

I then attended the lecture on dynamic languages in the CLR. First there was a demo of some loosely coupled VB code (late-binding) and then a demonstration of Iron Python for .NET. This was really cool. I remember seeing this about a year ago and wondering where it would end up. Finally the lecture ended with a demo of Lightweight Code Generation (LCG) features of the CLR 2.0. It's really easy to generation IL code using some help from the framework and get the IL to run in the context of the application on the fly. Interesting implications for scripting languages and dynamic languages with little to no type safety. You don't always have to compile everything ahead of time. (More about LCG at Joel Pobar's blog.)

64-bit Gaming...

I spent a little time getting killed (mostly) playing "Far Cry" on some AMD 64-bit hardware. Totally fun...

Ask the Experts...

Tonight was the Ask the Experts session and there were a ton of Microsoft experts in attendance to provide answers to customer questions. It was very crowded and there were lots of customers asking questions. This was by far the best organized Ask the Experts I've been to since I started attending trade shows. Every expert group had a table and there was a good directory for customers and us to follow. There were plenty of times when I had to walk a customer to another table, but having the index really helped.

As we were leaving Anders Hejlsberg was discussing topics at a whiteboard with about 20 people hanging around him. Some were taking pictures. The rest of us are amateurs compared to him when it comes be being an expert. I guess they could have called it "Ask *The* Expert".

Pedometer facts...

I've been wearing my pedometer the entire week here at PDC 05. Here are the latest statistics:

Total Distance	12.32 mi (19.83 km)
Total Steps	33,960
Calories burned	1456.9

Tomorrow is the last day of the show and I'm looking forward to getting back home to my family. I'll be blogging my last moments here in Los Angeles tomorrow. See you then...

Allen

PDC Day 3 - Domain Specific Languages - the future of Modeling

AllenD — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:13:00 GMT

Bob Muglia's General Session - Windows Server...

I just got out of Bob Muglia's keynote and it was great to see so many cool things happening in the Windows Server product. In particular I was impressed with IIS7 and it's capabilities. They designed an extensibility mechanism in IIS that allows an admin to completely control the modules that are used/loaded for the website as well as capability for a developer to modify the default capabilities of the modules there. What was shown was a different kind of directory listing that actually was a set of thumbnails for the images in the directory listing. Very cool...

Modeling and Visual Studio Team System...

As some of you know we have plans to include the team system modeling technologies API's in the VS SDK. I wanted to attend Jochen Seemann's presentation here at PDC in order to gauge the level of excitement and need for extensibility in order to be certain we provide the best SDK possible. By the size of the crowd (about 1500 people), I'd say that the modeling space is definitely huge and a lot of people are very excited/curious about what we're doing in this space. DSL isn't something to do with broadband or cable-modems. Domain Specific Languages is what we're talking about. Jochen had a quote: "A picture is worth a thousand words...but it's often the case that one doesn't know what the thousand words are." The vision for DSL tools is to instantiate the modeling tools exactly for a custom domain with our tools. We want to give the customer the freedom to express their domain since they are the experts in their domain. The DSL tools are on the web (as of Friday) on the MSDN site at Microsoft.com. You can see some modeling tools today in VS 2005 in the class designer, web service designer and the deployment designer. The DSL tools are designed to provide a toolkit for creating designers for Visual Studio. The DSL tools allow one to use the drawing surface, toolbox, property browser, explorer and validation. The modeling platform includes the following components: In-memory graph database (Domain Model), Drawing Surface (objects (shapes), connectors, auto-layout, routing, all customizable, etc.), Template Engine (for artifact generation), Shell Framework (Visual Studio UI integration - toolbox/menus), Validation Framework (checks constraints and guides user to resolve errors). The roles involved in modeling for software are Architect, Developer and Business Analyst). All of these roles can use MS provided designers, but there are several domains where MS won't provide designers and 3rd parties will provide them. The cool thing is that all of the models based on the platform will be able to work together and link artifacts and designers together.

During the session, Jochen designed a Simple Activity Language. He took 3 steps:

Define domain model (what do the shapes mean on the drawing surface, properties, states, inheritance relationships and behavior relationships, the meta-model)
Define the notation (decompose the language to basic units) - describe the shapes and connectors physical properties (text position, icons, colors, etc)
Define visualizations of the model via the notation elements

This works for really complex models as well as a simple one (like Jochen did on stage). As a side effect of this process you get a real nice specification of the language. To interact with the designer you write code for code/artifact generation, custom serialization, validation/constraints and custom behavior. This code can take advantage of the DSL SDK (that's the thing we want to provide in the VS SDK in the future).

The Toolkit generates a project that is actually a VS Package. It allows the package to launch in the Experimental hive. In the Exp hive we then create diagrams and manipulate the diagram with the design surface according to the model defined in the regular hive. In the demo Jochen then added a property to one of the shapes, rebuilt the model designer and showed again the Exp hive manipulating the designer and see the property he added.

One of the cool things is that the model database is able to be queried via a language and the API generated by the tool for the domain model.

If one can generate a single designer, one can generate multiple designers. What the modeling platform provides is a nice way to make multiple designers work together. A 'software factory' can generate and link these multiple designers. The DSL tools provide a tool window that allows one to create a table consisting of the rows and columns of shapes from two different designer surfaces. The table is then used to add dependencies with a check mark to associate elements from one model to elements from another.

Another cool feature of this toolkit is the linkage with the class diagram and code. With just a couple of clicks one can go from a use case domain shape, to a class object in the class designer to the code.

One of the final thing that Jochen did was to invite a partner (EDS) on stage to show their application which was driven with models during development. The EDS application had a bunch of code generators and stuff from about 4 years ago that generates applications for a 3-tier application using business logic, front end and the database. EDS wrote an add-in that generates a solution based on the models. It uses the API's of the DSL tools and the model. The solution generation add-in creates the front end code, unit tests (including a testing database with random data for testing), database scripts, stored procedures and links everything together using the business logic. The unit tests, by the way, are run by Visual Studio Team System Test.

For the future the DSL toolkit is planned for early 2006. Version 2 will include even tighter VS integration in the next version of VS after VS 2005.

Get more information at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem/workshop/dsltools

Allen

PDC Day 1 - Power Outages and Uploads

AllenD — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 01:05:00 GMT

Well, yesterday was very eventful.

Just after my previous post, we broke for lunch and just as we were starting to present our after-lunch information the power went out in Los Angeles. Not just in the Convention Center, but all over the city. According to reports 2 million people were affected. It was an interesting 30-45 minutes as we sat around in the dark (a little bit of illumination from ambient light). We finally got up on stage and did some general Q&A. The power finally came back on and we were able to continue our preconference session without further incident.

During my portion of the precon, I wrote a To Do Manager from scratch (ok, practically from scratch). This is the same demo that I did at the Dev Lab in August on campus. The code for this demo has been posted on GotDotNet. This code project requires the Sep 05 CTP of the VS SDK and is expected to work with Visual Studio 2005. I wrote it using a recent VS 2005 release candidate (internal), but it should work with any VS 2005 RTM Release Candidate.

After the precon our VS partner program hosted a little party at Dodger Stadium for a few partners. The Dodgers did very well and it was a nice treat to see a big league game in a beautiful stadium. It was fun talking with partners and letting our hair down a little bit.

This morning I attended BillG's and JimAll's keynotes. They were both very good. Don Box, Chris Andersen, Scott Guthrie and Anders Hejlsberg were very good as usual. Windows Vista is awesome, our programming model and frameworks are really powerful and it is truly a great time to be a software developer.

Fun facts: My pedometer is still going. Totals for the week as of Tue morning: 5.49 miles, 15136 steps. Since the last report this represents 2.88 miles walked.

PDC Day 0 - Precon

AllenD — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 21:07:00 GMT

Hello. I'm sitting in 501ABC for the PDC05 Preconference Session on Visual Studio Extensibility.

If you are coming to the PDC, please drop by and say hello!

I, along with Phil Taylor, Doug Hodges, Craig Skibo, am presenting information today. We have 6 hours of content to talk about VS Extensibility, VS Architecture and demo a bunch of code.

I'm going to be at various partner and extensibility related events during PDC05. If you need to get in touch with me, please try email or the PDC comm net site. We have a booth in the pavillion, a hands-on lab and I'll also be in the Tools and Languages Track Lounge most of the time. There's also an Ask The Experts session on Thursday night. I'll be leaving LA on Friday. Hope to see you here.

Curious facts: This week I'm wearing a pedometer full time to see how far I end up walking. I started wearing it on Sunday afternoon as I entered the airport in Seattle. As of Monday 11:10 am I've walked 2.61 miles (7215 steps) in 1:29 hours.

VSIP Dev Lab

AllenD — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 23:18:00 GMT

We just completed another Dev Lab on the Microsoft campus. This is an event for partners to bring their VS integrations on campus and have Microsoft help them get their code working with the latest platforms.

In this case we have several partners that are getting ready to launch their integrated tools when we launch VS 2005 later this year.

For me, it was a hectic time since I had just returned from a road-trip vacation in Califorinia the week before and had 2 presentations to give during the week.

I returned home on Friday night (late) and worked over the weekend for my Monday morning presentation. Then I worked on my second presentation on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday morning I gave that presentation. I was much more relaxed after having given that final presentation.

The first presentation was kind of a Sprint review over the last few Sprints to get direct customer feedback and what should be in the VS SDK. I showed the Product Backlog and demo'd some of the new samples in the SDK. We got a lot of good feedback that we will immediately begin taking action on to give customers what they asked for. Some of the same information is already public on the VSIPDev.com site.

The second presentation I delivered was a dry-run of a presentation I'm giving at PDC in Sept for the Visual Studio Extensiblity Pre-conference Session. (By the way the PDC is sold-out.) This presentation was a walk-through of the Managed Package Framework and I spent a great deal of time during the session writing code demonstrating an integration that took advantage of the strengths of the managed packge framework.

The integration that I wrote on stage was a To-Do Manager tool that used a Tool Window, the Property Browser, Task List, Tool/Options Dialog all in a Windows Form. Pretty cool. I will be blogging more about that project since it revealed a few technical areas that need some explanation and I had to come up with a workaround or two to some limitations in VS and the Managed Package Framework.

By the way, our August Sprint is coming to a close and we'll likely be providing a preview of the VS SDK as a result with some of the newest sample code. In addition to the reference samples for C# Package and C# MenuAndCommands from last month, we've added following reference samples: C++ Package, C++ MenuAndCommands and C# Services. We're still working on that last 3 on our list C++ Tool Window, C# Tool Window and C++ Services.

I'll be blogging more about the VS SDK in the future as well.