Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

re: Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

Robert — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 01:52:21 GMT

Is there a reason that the SP1 beta is taking over an hour to install? It doesn't seem to be frozen since it's now installing a different component than it was 20 minutes ago.

re: Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

James — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:59:54 GMT

This is great news. I hope this makes its way into Visual Studio proper in the next release (or even the next service pack!!). This solves problems I face in my job every day, where we have a need to develop common libraries to use across multiple .NET-based platforms. I cannot stress enough how glad I am to see this being given the attention it deserves!

One aspect that is sorely missing is support for .NET Compact. Windows Mobile, now supposedly known as Windows Embedded Handheld, runs on rugged data collection devices in many major enterprises. My employer has spent years and many, many millions of dollars developing applications for this platform, and we have tens of thousands (and growing) such devices in the field, running Windows Mobile 5, 6.x, and even some older 2003 devices. As you no doubt know, these devices run the .NET Compact framework. Unfortunately, .NET Compact represents a different subset of the full .NET than Silverlight does. For the applications that run on these devices, Windows Phone 7 is not even close to being a viable option, so for the foreseeable future we will continue to run on the current platform.

It does seem that Microsoft is still trying to figure out the future direction of Windows Embedded Handheld (WEH). That said, assuming backwards compatibility remains important and the .NET Compact framework eventually gets upgraded to v4 and gains Visual Studio 2010 support, I would suggest that adding the .NET Compact framework to the Portable Library Tools would be in order. I'm not sure exactly how the subset of .NET representing the compact framework would mesh with the BCL Core, XML Core, HTTP Core, etc. If it ends up just being a few isolated classes or methods, hopefully those can make their way into the next release of Silverlight and Windows Phone 7, to maximize the available capabilities of libraries made to be shared across platforms.

If .NET Compact could get upgraded to the latest version of .NET, have Windows Mobile/WEH get Visual Studio 2010 support, and support added to the Portable Library Tools, this would represent a *huge* step forward for many large enterprises that rely on that platform for their critical line of business applications!!

Thanks again for prompting compatibility across the different .NET platforms!

re: Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

Antao Almada — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:53:12 GMT

Great news! I'm working on a project that compiles to all these platforms (including Mono) and managing all the .csproj has been a real pain.

re: Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

BCL Team — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:54:47 GMT

Re: Mono

Yes! We're planning to get in touch with Miguel on this soon.

Re: SQLCLR

I'm not too familiar with SQLCLR, but I believe right now SQLCLR only supports the .NET 2.0/3.0/3.5 CLR and portable libraries require .NET 4 with the update mentioned in the blog post. If that's the case, it isn't going to work today. However, in theory, when SQLCLR adds support for the .NET 4 CLR, portable libraries will likely just work, though, this isn't something we're explicitly testing right now. We'll keep it in mind for the future.

Re: Open Source

I'm not sure if we're going to make the tools open source, but we are planning to make it so that other target frameworks can be easily plugged in (without having to recompile the tools).

Re: Project references

Yes, project to project references work as you'd expect. We've made the necessary changes to Visual Studio for this to work without it complaining and forcing you to add references to the .dll instead of the project.

Re: ViewModels

It should be possible to create ViewModels in portable libraries. INotifyPropertyChanged is available. However, the CTP currently doesn't provide INotifyCollectionChanged or ObservableCollection<T>, so you have to use some dependency injection tricks to get things to work, but it is possible. Shawn Burke is planning some blog posts that show how to do it. We're also still tweaking the APIs and will likely make it possible to use ObservableCollection<T> and friends when targeting some of the platforms.

Hope this helps,

Justin

re: Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

skytribe — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:19:56 GMT

This is one of the new project types that uses the VBCore functionality implemented in SP1

blogs.msdn.com/.../vb-core-new-compilation-mode-in-visual-studio-2010-sp1.aspx

re: Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

Joe White — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 23:05:32 GMT

So can we add a project reference to a "portable library" from both .NET and Silverlight apps? I know the binary compatibility is there as of .NET 4/SL4, but Visual Studio won't let you add a project reference -- you have to browse to the .dll and add a reference to that, and so it doesn't rebuild when it needs to.

Will there be a way to use something better than the absolute lowest common denominator? It would be fantastic to be able to write ViewModel logic, INotifyPropertyChanged, etc. to share between a .NET app and a Silverlight app. I don't care about XNA or phone, so I don't want functionality taken away just because they don't support something.

re: Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

Kevin R Moore — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 22:21:28 GMT

Could this be open source? Should this be open source? Being able to help with issues, offer wrappers, and target other platforms (Micro CLR, Mono) would be great reasons.

re: Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

Alfred Myers — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 22:13:30 GMT

What about deploying one of those portable libraries to SQLCLR? As I understand the Core BCL and Core XML (of most of them) could be run from with SQLCLR. Or am I missing something?

re: Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

Samuel Jack — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:36:17 GMT

Exactly my thoughts on Mono. Miguel, are you reading this?

re: Announcing Portable Library Tools CTP [Justin Van Patten]

Chris Hardy — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:22:24 GMT

I second what Gareth said. Mono, MonoTouch/MonoDroid support would be great.