.NET4Office : Great Moments at Work

People to schedule at Tech-Ed--put Rio to work for you

Eric Carter — Sat, 22 May 2004 21:03:00 GMT

There are a bunch of people going down to Tech-Ed from my team. I was originally going to be one of them, but things have gotten too busy trying to get VSTO 2.0 shipped, and I got bumped from the list because of my responsibilities here at work. Waaah, sniff, sniff.

There's this cool tool at Tech-Ed called “Rio” that lets you schedule 1 on 1 time with Microsoft people and other Tech-Ed speakers to express your concerns, learn more, chat, whatever. If you want to talk about VSTO 1.0, VSTO 2.0, or Office development in general, use the Rio tool at Tech-Ed to schedule some time with any of these people from my team:

Greg DeCicco--A lead PM on VSTO 2.0, he's in the middle of everything.
Muhammad Arrabi--A PM on my team--he knows a bunch about VSTO 2.0 especially around our data story.
BJ Holtgrewe--Our fearless marketing lead
Harry Miller--A great writer on our team
Iouri Simernitski--Developer who has done a lot of Office programming and working with the community
Mike Hernandez--Community lead on our team, he's our eyes and ears in the community
Paul Stubbs--PM working on VSTO and future products, also has a lot of prior experience in Office solutions.
Svet Bonev--Developer who has written large chunks of our data story for VSTO 2.0
Donald Drake--Lead Developer on VSTO 2.0 who has built the design-time VS experience around VSTO 2.0

MSDN Webcast on Visual Studio Tools for Office Version 2: Developing Word Solutions

Eric Carter — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 19:53:00 GMT

Kathleen McGrath is doing an MSDN webcast on VSTO 2.0 and Word tomorrow, Tuesday April 27th, at 11 AM PST.

Description: “This webcast will demonstrate how to use the new actions pane, provided by Microsoft® Visual Studio® Tools for the Microsoft Office System, Version 2.0, in your Microsoft Office Word 2003 solutions. The actions pane simplifies the current smart document solution development experience by significantly reducing the amount of code that needs to be written, provides support for Windows Forms controls in the Document Actions task pane, does not require Word documents to be XML-based, and eliminates the need for creating XML expansion packs.“

Have you tested your product over lunch break?

Eric Carter — Sat, 17 Apr 2004 17:11:00 GMT

We had some interesting bugs recently in VSTO 2.0 that basically involve letting the product sit for a while--like over lunch break--without doing anything. Testers and devs hate this kind of a bug: Do X, do Y, wait 5-15 minutes, do Z. But if you are doing anything across appdomains--for example, you have an object that derives from MarshalByRefObject that you are passing from one appdomain to another--you should do the same. Let your product sit over your lunch break and make sure it still works when you come back.

Turned out that this bug was related to our remoting leases expiring. Thomas Quinn, a fantastic architect at large on the VSTO 2.0 team, fixed this bug and I quote from his checkin:

“These bugs both had to do with Remoting "leases" expiring. As you know, in .NET there is no refcounting. In the same AppDomain, object references are tracked by the garbage collector and they are marked for deletion when there are no more active references. When you pass an object across an AppDomain boundary, though, GC can't keep track of it any more -- GC is done on a per domain basis. When you pass an object by reference across the domain boundary (in order to do this it must derive from MarshalByRefObject) the Remoting infrastructure takes control. The lifetime is then controlled by a "lease." As long as there is an active lease on the object it stays alive. Each cross domain call renews the lease. By default, the lease is 5 minutes -- meaning that if you don't talk to an object passed to you across the domain boundary for 5 minutes or more it will get cleaned up, and subsequent calls to the proxy you are holding will throw an remoting exception. Anytime you derive an object from MarshalByRefObject you must take the lifetime of the object into account. There are several ways to override the default behavior, involving custom lease implementations or implementing sponsors for the objects that will keep them alive. If interested, you can read more about it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpconlifetimeleases.asp

The override used in this fix is the simplest one -- we give the MBRO objects an infinite lease (meaning they stay alive as long as the AppDomain is alive). This is done by simply overriding MarshalByRefObject.InitializeLifetimeService to return null. In this case, this is exactly what we want, since the objects are part of the runtime AppDomain manager that lives with the customization in its domain.

I changed all of the classes in the [VSTO 2.0 runtime] directory that derive from MBRO. These changes fixed the bugs in question. It is possible that there are other classes that derive from MBRO more indirectly and may exhibit the same problem through some other code path. Beware of MBRO.“

Of course giving your objects infinite lease may be the wrong fix given your application. But that goes without saying right :)

Eric Lippert

Eric Carter — Sat, 10 Apr 2004 19:48:00 GMT

Eric Lippert, who has singlehandedly done more for purple Lucida Sans Unicode than anyone I know, links to my blog http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2004/04/09/110556.aspx.

Although he's got plenty to blog about already, hopefully he will eventually get around to blogging about some of the cool work he's been doing on VSTO 2.0--if I don't beat him to the punch. For example, Eric has been working on the generated data/view programming models we create when you use the schema mapping features in Word and Excel. Picture mapping a schema like “Customer.xsd” in Excel, going into the code editor, and seeing nicely named controls that drop down from the left drop down list in the code editors--all named with names that correspond to the terminology you used in the schema.

Eric has also done some a lot of interesting work on the code generation we do for you in VSTO 2.0. To generate code on your behalf, we use an intermediate declarative XML representation that we then convert to C# or VB.NET. Of course, a similar approach is also used in Avalon's XAML files. Eric blogs about some of the implications of this approach here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2004/03/04/83981.aspx

I'll be there

Eric Carter — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 07:12:00 GMT

You may have noticed my “I'll be there” picture.. I'll be there--isn't that like a really bad Michael Bolton song or something of that ilk?

Anywhoo, I'll be at Tech-Ed this year talking about VSTO 2.0 mainly, but I'm sure I can help you out if you have questions about VSTO 1.0.

The first talk I'll be giving is Dev 367 which is an overview of VSTO 2.0. There'll be lots of demos and not many slides--you should have a good sense of what you can do with VSTO 2.0 by the end of this talk.

Also, I'm giving another session you can sign up for with the very descriptive and apparently case-sensitive title TECDEV17. This will be about security and deployment features of VSTO 2.0 although most of what I'll talk about in this talk will apply to VSTO 1.0 as well.

Finally, I'll be on the floor to answer questions, or at least point you in the right direction--so look me up.

Hope I gave you some additional reasons to get your boss to send you out to this conference.

MSDN Webcast on Data and Databinding in VSTO 2

Eric Carter — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 10:20:00 GMT

A member of my team, Muhammad Arrabi, is giving an MSDN webcast tomorrow on VSTO 2.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=25936

Go give him a hard time for me J

MSDN Webcast: Data and Databinding with Visual Studio Tools for Office Version 2 - Level 200
April 06, 2004
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Pacific Time
Muhammad Arrabi, Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
The Visual Studio® Tools for the Microsoft® Office Systems in Whidbey provides a rich data programming model for automating Word and Excel documents. This webcast will showcase some of these features, such as databinding to Office controls, caching data in the document for offline use, and integrating the data model with the new Office 2003 XML features.