All About Interop : Visual Studio

How to Build REST apps on .NET using WCF

DotNetInterop — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:03:00 GMT

There's a new screencast series on building services using the WCF part of .NET.

The first few are already available. The first one is the basic "Hello World" example, the next couple cover REST:

How to build a WCF Service using Visual Studio 2008, and .NET 3.5. (10 minutes)

Creating a HI-REST GET Service with WCF 3.5 sp1 (15 minutes)

Consuming a HI-REST GET Service From Silverlight 2 (Beta 2)

How to Shape the URI in REST services built on WCF (See also, the accompanying blog post.)

There will be more to come, too, covering Content Negotiation, Atom, and more. Stay tuned!

SAP Enterprise Services Explorer for .NET (Visual Studio) does WCF

DotNetInterop — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:07:00 GMT

via http://dedjo.blogspot.com/2008/03/localization-fix-for-sap-esa-explorer.html

SAP just released a sneak preview of an add-in for Visual Studio 2005 that they call "SAP Enterprise Services Explorer for Microsoft .NET ". It feels like a misnomer to me, because it's not for .NET, which is the name of the programming framework. It's for Visual Studio, which is the name of the tool. But lots of people use those names interchangeably, I take it. So there you have it.

Based on my read, the tool allows a developer to query the SAP Service Registry, and then generate, for .NET applications, web services proxy classes, that enable .NET apps to connect to the services. There are some nifty query capabilities for accessing the service registry. And, the generated proxy is a WCF client. That's what I like to see.

Not sure if this also works in VS2008.

here's the link: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/dotnet

Worth checking out!

Develop Ruby in Visual Studio (on VS Shell?)

DotNetInterop — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:59:00 GMT

Where's Ruby?

There is a 3rd-party Ruby (and Rails) developer capability built on top of Visual Studio. It's called Ruby In Steel - you can find it here http://www.sapphiresteel.com .

This is one of those deals where you license Visual Studio, then you license the Ruby In Steel thing, and off you go. But the problem is, for Ruby devs, sometimes the initial license fees are a bit pricey. For license cost reasons alone, they sometimes look elsewhere (sniff sniff!) for their Ruby IDE.

Now comes word from the Ruby In Steel people that they are extermely interested in the VS Shell. They want to offer a low-cost 'all in one' edition of Ruby In Steel for those poeple who don't have Visual Studio for cost reasons.

For those who are not clear on what the Visual Studio Shell is, see here. Imagine Visual Studio, stripped of its compiler support, its debugger, the project management stuff. With all this stuff removed, it is a "shell" of its former self. This is VS Shell in isolated mode. One way to think about it - it is basically a blank slate user interface - it has menus, menu items, movable and dockable panels, collapsible lists, property sheets, a graphical design framework, and so on - but they are all blank. So if you want to build a designer, for anything, you can use VS Shell as the starting point. And it's a royalty-free license. There is also an integrated mode for VS Shell, and that's interesting if you want to use VS Shell to merge with any install of Visual Studio on the system. This is particularly interesting to companies who want to provide programming tools built on Visual Studio.

Anyway, if you are interested in developing Ruby in Visual Studio connect with the Ruby in Steel people or get back to me here on this blgo and I'll connect you.

On a related note, if you are a Ruby fan, you might also check out IronRuby, which is an implementation of Ruby on the .NET CLR (DLR).

From the Treasured Gems Dept: GotCodeSnippets.net

DotNetInterop — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:10:00 GMT

There are two kinds of developers who use Visual Studio 2005: The ones who know about and use gotcodesnippets.net, and the ones who will soon know about and use that site.

In Word, there are macros. In the emacs text editor, you can define extensions using elisp. VS2005 has this handy little feature called code snippets, which allows you to quickly generate boilerplate code. All of us have written a class that uses a private field behind a public property. After the 3rd time you go through the motions of doing that, you think to yourself, "this should be automated". Code snippets can do that.

Of course, the C# language for "Orcas" includes a feature for Automatically Implementing Properties. This feature would help with that particular example, but it isn't a general replacement for code snippets.

And... if you are not a Visual Studio developer today, gotcodesnippets.net might make you think about becoming one!

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista, Beta

DotNetInterop — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:15:00 GMT

Microsoft have released the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista, Beta!

What a mouthful! What is this thing? Well, back in September, Microsoft revealed that Visual Studio 2005 would not work on Windows Vista, when Vista first shipped. At that time Jay Roxe of Microsoft said there would be an update to VS2005 to allow it to work on Vista. This is that update, although it is only in Beta form. The link above is the English version of the update. I understand that the Japanese version of this beta is also coming very soon - look for it.

Open Source and Visual Studio

DotNetInterop — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 16:43:00 GMT

Subversion or CVS with VS.NET?

Microsoft's forthcoming Visual Studio Team System will include source code control, integrated defect tracking, testing, reports, and a bunch of other project management and project governance tools and capabilities. All built in and integrated. BUT! That does not mean that there are not other options, even open source options. AnkhSVN and Igloo are a couple examples of source code control add-ins for Visual Studio. NUnit covers unit testing. There are others, too! Here's a brief list, with some details:

AnkhSVN: A Subversion addin for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, has been available for 18 months or so now. AnkhSVN is a Visual Studio .NET addin for the Subversion version control system. It allows you to perform the most common version control operations directly from inside the VS.NET IDE. It currently works with VS2003 and VS2002 (If you are running VS2002 you really should upgrade).
Jalindi Igloo allows you to connect Microsoft Visual Studio and other IDEs directly to a CVS repository. The program is completely free and can be used anyway you like. There is a nice article on how to get it working with VS.NET at The Code Project.
NUnit is a unit-testing framework for any .NET language. The current production release, version 2.2, is the fourth major release of this xUnit based unit testing tool for Microsoft .NET. It is written entirely in C# and has been completely redesigned to take advantage of many .NET language features, for example custom attributes and other reflection related capabilities. NUnit brings xUnit to all .NET languages.
csUnit, another unit-testing framework. I think less popular than NUnit.
MbUnit, another unit-testing framework, the project leads say this one differentiates itself from NUnit in it's extensibility model. It contains a number of tests that go beyond the simple unit testing, such as combinatorial testing, data oriented testing, etc...
TestDriven.NET - a testing add-in for Visual Studio, works with {N,cs,Mb}Unit and even VS Team System
CruiseControl.NET - a tool to aid in continuous integration , a team development practice which aims to reduce risk in team projects by integrating changes back to the main source tree, more or less continuously. Popularized by Martin Fowler.
Ndoc, which generates API documentation from .NET assemblies and XML documentation comment files.
Nant, a build tool.
NCover, a code coverage tool.
NMock, a mock objects framework for .NET (mock object frameworks are often used to aid unit testing).
Snippy, a tool to edit and modify the code snippets in VS2005.
There is even a VSTS-clone, called NTeam. I haven't used this one, and it looks like the project may not have delivered a release yet. But it's something to watch.

Open Source + Visual Studio = ?

All of the things I mentioned above are open source tools, or have source code available. Does it seem strange that Visual Studio works with them? It shouldn't.

Much of it is possible through the VSIP SDK, and the published extensibility interfaces for Visual Studio. For those tools that don't integrate into VS but rather into .NET itself, is it too obvious to point out that .NET Framework can be used on open source projects?

If you think it's strange that open source stuff works together with Microsoft commercial products, you may have been reading too many press releases from companies saying "Microsoft means lock in" and ".NET is a Windows-only proposition". Sure, Visual Studio runs only on Windows, but that doesn't mean your SCCS has to run on Windows too. It doesn't say anything about your enterprise database, or your queueing system, or your testing tools, and so on. Microsoft tries to encourage extensions of Visual Studio, specifically. Check out Dr Ex's page.

But Wait, there's More.

There are a number of other companion tools, too . Some free, some open source, some commercial. Some plug into VS, some are standalone. Some of my favorites are: Reflector for examining assemblies, CSAH for helping VS devs post their code on blogs, WSCF for contract-first webservices development, and the vsPropertyGenerator to help automate adding and removing properties on C# classes. The SharpToolbox has a very good list, organized by category.

Don't get me wrong, I believe there is real value in integrating the various "big block" pieces, and delivering a nice workflow, as Microsoft does with VSTS. But it won't make sense for everyone. Some people like their Subversion or their CVS (~shudder~). They want their NUnit, they like their CruiseControl. I say to those people: Good on ya. With Visual Studio you can keep using and exploiting the stuff you love. And, beyond the big blocks, there are lots of smaller add-ins and complementary tools that might come in handy in your environment.

What are you using?