AllenD's WebLog : Visual Studio

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 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

Visual Studio and Windows Workflow Designer rocks! - PDC Day 2

AllenD — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:26:00 GMT

At the morning keynote I saw a great integration with Visual Studio in the Windows Workflow Designer. I'm sitting in the PDC general session this morning and during Eric Rudder's keynote he invited the Windows Workflow Foundation team to demonstrate their cool tools. The really awesome thing that I saw was a great design surface for work flow objects in a graphical form. To seal the deal the demo showed debugging the work flow directly in Visual Studio and seamlessly interacting with the usual C# debugger. The workflow debugger was completely graphical with a little breakpoint glyph attached to the workflow object. There were also 'callstacks' of the work flow objects and properties of the selected work flow objects showing current state to allow debugging the workflow and the code at the same time. This is hugely powerful and really shows off how awesome the Visual Studio platform is.

Another big deal at this session was the Microsoft Expression suite of applications that allow graphic design, web site design and interactive designers to work together. They aren't hosted in Visual Studio (they do share some aspects via common project files), but one can easily see how lots of aspects of those tools can be integrated. For now, they are separate tools.

If you are at the PDC today, please stop by the Tools and Languages Track Lounge. I'll be hanging out there most of the day. At 2:00 pm those of us from the VS Extensibility team that are here are scheduled for a "meet the team" event. Please stop by and say hello.

Blog to you later...

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.

Managed Package Framework Webcast

AllenD — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:25:00 GMT

I forgot about this 'til now.

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032258553&Culture=en-US is a link to a MSDN webcast I did describing the Managed Package Framework for the masses. Enjoy.

Back in the saddle again

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

Whew! It's been a while hasn't it?

My new son was born 9/30 and I returned to work late October after infant care leave. We're all hard at work here getting Whidbey Beta 2 ready to ship. The holiday's hit and I spent a bunch of time on the road and on airplanes.

I'm back from vacation now and sitting in a rountable discussion with VSIP partners at the January VSIP Dev Lab here in Redmond. Good suggestions and a lot of hard work getting partner products ready to run in Whidbey Beta 2. Thank you to all the parnters in attendance.

Hey, I'm a video star! Check out the latest installment on Microsoft's Channel 9 community site: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=35379. A bunch of interviews of hard-working computer geeks getting Visual Studio ready for release.

I certainly hope to post here more often and do some interesting posts now that things have finally settled down in my life. Hope you are doing well.

Later,

Allen

Extensibility makes MSDN TV

AllenD — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 23:37:00 GMT

Check out Ken Hardy, VS Core PM for Extensibility share some info on MSDN TV.

If you were at TechEd 2004 San Diego, you might catch yourself in the background...

Solution Options Persistence

AllenD — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 22:52:00 GMT

I investigated this question earlier today for an internal VS client and wanted to share the results with the rest of the world...

Your VS Package can place data into the solution file (.sln) or solution user options (.suo) file by implementing IVsPersistSolutionOpts (.suo affecting) or IVsPersistSolutionProps (.sln affecting). These interfaces should be implemented by the same class which implements IVsPackage.

The VS IDE will call these interfaces for each loaded package when a solution is opened/closed. If your package is not loaded when the solution is opened, then you won't be called to load your solution options. The remedy to this problem is to call the SVsSolutionPersistence service's IVsSoltionPersistence::LoadPackageUserOpts method yourself. This will cause the VS IDE to eventually call your IVsPersisteSolutionsOpts::LoadUserOptions method. The IVsSolutionPersistence::LoadPackageUserOpts method takes a IVsPersistSolutionOpts interface parameter which should be your package class pointer. You also specify your unique “keyname” when calling the method.

The above is true in VS7 and VS7.1.

In Whidbey the VSIP Managed Package Framework provides a nice base class (Package) implementing these interfaces and calling them for you. You simply call Package.AddOptionKey to add your unique keyname to the list of option keys the package handles. During the Package.Initialize() method the option keys are loaded using the above services/interfaces. You should call AddOptionKey during your package class constructor or any other method that is called before the base class Initialize() method.

The VSIP EnvSDK sample SlnExt is a great sample showing how to all of this in native code not using the managed package framework. I have designs to rewrite that sample to use the managed package framework, but for now that is left as an exercise for the reader.

Later,

Allen

Whidbey Beta 1 Feedback

AllenD — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 17:19:00 GMT

I forgot to mention the way to provide VS 2005 feedback. Visit the MSDN Product Feedback Center (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/)

For feedback related to VSIP Beta 1, you can use the same site. Just be sure to include “VSIP” in the issue description so it gets routed to the proper team.