Skinner's Blog : Videos

Custom Toolbox Items

camerons — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:52:48 GMT

[NOTE: This post is part of a blog series, the start of which is here.]

When defining layer diagrams for your organization, or various other modeling concepts and diagrams that you want to make available to your team, you can of course simply check in those diagrams to your version control system, such as Team Foundation Server. But another mechanism we have enabled in the product that can easily be overlooked is the ability to create custom toolbox items from existing diagrams ( UML or Layer ), and then make those available through the VSIX mechanism also new in Visual Studio 2010.

In this post, I’m going to walk you through the steps needed to create a couple different custom toolbox items. ( I’ll talk about the new VSIX capabilities in another post. )

Let’s create a Layer Diagram ( I discuss the basics of what the Layer Diagram is about here ) that can be used as the pattern for a new toolbox item that will appear whenever a Layer Diagram is present in the VS document well.

1) Select the “Architecture->New Diagram…” menu item.

2) Select the “Layer Diagram” in the Add New Diagram dialog, and give the diagram the “PresentationLayer” name:

3) If you are following along exactly, this will prompt you for the name of a new modeling project. Let’s give the project the name of “CustomToolBoxItems”:

Cool. Now the new layer diagram and modeling project show up inside Visual Studio.

What we’re going to do now is replicate a layer diagram that is found in the second edition of the Patterns & Practices Architecture Guide. Specifically, the layer diagram described in Chapter 6: Presentation Layer Guidelines.

4) Create the following layer diagram:

Tips & Tricks, plus a Beta2 BUG ALERT:

I cut a quick video to include with this post to show a couple of suggestions / tips on how to quickly build the diagram above, as well as call out some funky behavior in the Beta2 build that has since been corrected. Here’s that video.

One thing I failed to mention in the video is that you can navigate in and out of nested layers by holding the Shift-> to get the tab to go to inner layers, and Shift-< to go to containers.

5) Save the PresentationLayer.layerdiagram

At this point, you need to create a directory in your %userprofile%\my Documents\Visual Studio 2010 directory.

6) Start a command prompt and cd to %userprofile%\my Documents\Visual Studio 2010

7) Create a directory called “Team Architecture”

8) cd into the “Team Architecture” directory and create another directory called “Custom Toolbox Items”

9) Copy your “PresentationLayer.*” files from your modeling project to the “Custom Toolbox Items” directory.

Here’s an image of my command line actions of steps 5-9:

Ok, we’re almost there. Before we exit Visual Studio, do take notice of the current toolbox window, which should look something like this:

10) Exit and then restart Visual Studio, and create a new modeling project.

11) Create a new layer diagram

Once the new layer diagram is visible, your toolbox should look something like this:

At this point, you can select the “PresentationLayer” toolbox item and drop into your new layer diagram. You should see the exact same diagram that we created in the step 4!

Now this is great, but we also give you the ability to control how these new toolbox items are displayed and organized. Enter the .tbxinfo file.

12) Create a file called “MyCustomItems.tbxinfo” in the “Custom Toolbox Items” directory we created in step 8.

13) Open that file in Visual Studio, and paste the following code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<customToolboxItems xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2010/TeamArchitect/CustomToolboxItems">
<customToolboxItem fileName="PresentationLayer.layerdiagram">
    <displayName>
      <value>Presentation Layer Pattern</value>
    </displayName>
    <tabName>
      <value>Patterns & Practices</value>
    </tabName>
    <image>
      <bmp fileName="cloudservice.ico"/>
    </image>
    <f1Keyword>
      <value>PLayerHelp</value>
    </f1Keyword>
    <tooltip>
      <value>Create the Presentation Layer As mentioned In Pattern And Practices' Architecture Guidance v2</value>
    </tooltip>
</customToolboxItem>
</customToolboxItems>

Once you save that file, exit Visual Studio, open a modeling project and open a layer diagram, you’ll see the following:

NOTE:

As you play around with these custom tool box items, it is possible that you’ll start to see toolbox items from past experiments. If you start to see things your aren’t expecting, right click in the toolbox and select “Reset Toolbox”:

That’s it! You can experiment with adding more custom toolbox items created by using layer diagrams, and you can do the exact same thing with any of the UML diagrams as well. This is a great way to get started with Design Patterns or any other template you’d like to make more accessible with your engineering team.

Enjoy!

Cameron

[NOTE: This post is part of a blog series, the start of which is here.]

DSL Multiple Views example and other links

camerons — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:29:54 GMT

Mr. Provost was recently interviewed by the ElegantCode folks. Find that podcast here.

Wanted to make people aware of the excellent work two of our MVPs ( Pascal Recchia and Anthony Guerot ) have done recently with the DSL Toolkit. Checkout this great article on how they have manipulated the DSL API in order to get multiple views over a single store. They have also provided access to a video showing the functionality, as well as the code they created.

This is great stuff, and does show the power of the DSL framework that we have built the UML designers coming in VSTS 2010 on.

With the 2010 product, we hope to make this type of functionality even easier, with even more extensibility options possible with new APIs we will be providing.

Enjoy!

Channel 9 and 10-4

camerons — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:09:51 GMT

If you are not already aware of Channel 9, stop what you are doing right now and go check it out.

Really.

I'll wait. :)

Channel 9 has a long a brilliant history of shining a light on all things that Microsoft is doing through the video medium. Soon after the 2008 PDC was over, the session videos were made available on Channel 9, allowing folks who couldn't make the conference to see the details, but also giving the folks who were there the ability to catch the sessions they were unable to catch in person. ( Here's the link to my talk at the PDC. )

In addition, when the VSTS 2010 CTP became available, the Channel 9 folks launched a series of videos that introduced you to the various areas of the Team System product line ( including your's truly :) ).

Well now, they're doing it again.

Today the Channel 9 folks have announced a new video podcast series entitled "10-4". The idea is simple: every week, provide a video to the community detailing various aspects of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.

Check out Brian Keller's post for some more details.

I love those guys!

Sticky Toolbox

camerons — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:47:31 GMT

I wanted to make folks aware of a seemingly small but quite important new feature found in the toolbox for any of the new diagram types in the 2010 Architecture product. ( This is also a feature that all new designers built with the DSL toolkit can enjoy as well! ) It is important as it makes dropping many new elements of the same type much easier. You simply "double-click" on a toolbox element, which puts you into "sticky" mode, allowing you to drop that selected element as many times as you'd like. To get out of this mode, you hit the ESC key, or right click in the diagram area.

Here's a little video that shows this feature in action. The video shows what a single click does in the toolbox, drag & drop from the toolbox, and then a double-click in the toolbox.

Small and simple, but does make a difference. Enjoy!