- DSL Book samples updated for Visual Studio 2008
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It's taken us a little while, but the code samples for our book, Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools, are now updated for Visual Studio 2008.
You can download them from www.domainspecificdevelopment.com.
Woo Hoo. Enjoy.
- We shipped the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta!
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Quan just announced that today we shipped another release of the Visual Studio 2008 SDK.
See more detail including the readme over on his blog.
Incidentally, you can meet Quan and also Mariano and Gearard from our team at TechEd Developers 2008 down in sunny Florida.
- Where have all the testers gone?
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(With apologies to Paula Cole)
We've had jobs posted for testers for DSL Tools and the other cool Visual Studio eXtensibility things we're doing here in Redmond on the Visual Studio Ecosystem team for a while now and to my amazement, they're still open.
We're looking for a lead and a couple of individual contributors to really build out or QA team.
Here's the link for the lead position
Lead Software Development Engineer in Test
and here's the individual contributor position
Software Development Engineer in Test
As a reminder, SDETs at Microsoft spend their time working out how to test things and then building tools and code to test other code. I think of it as a different mind-set applied to the traditional developer skill-set. When they find something amiss, they typically analyze the product code to the point where they can tell development exactly what's wrong (and often tell us what the fix is too) and how to look for other instances of the same class of problem. Additionally there's room for specialization in non-functional disciplines like performance testing, accessibility testing, preventative tooling, etc.
We found great folks to fill our open developer positions, but you guys just aren't biting right now for our SDET roles. What gives? Don't you like being paid to break things?
- Couple more VSX bloggers
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And here's a couple more folks with VSX/DSL related blog series that I missed from my previous post:
It's really cool to see folks out there pushing our technology well beyond what comes out of the box.
- A rash of bloggers
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Just lately there seems to be a veritable feast of new blog stuff about VSX (if you don't mind me switching metaphors). Some of these I stumbled across and some were pointed up to me by DuncanP.
Phew!
- Welcome Jean-Marc!
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Somewhat belatedly, I wanted to welcome the latest addition to the Visual Studio eXtensibility team.
Jean-Marc Prieur has been a long-time contributor to our community and now he's joined the team. I'm sure he'll have a huge impact with his passion for extending all things Visual Studio.
Welcome on board Jean-Marc.
- CSLAFactory.net
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Josef Eissing and Marcel Binot just dropped me a note to say that they'd released a CTP of their new DSL for working with Rocky Lhotka's popular CSLA application framework. Having played Killer Bunnies with Rocky one time, I thought I'd better give it a mention.
You can find more detail at http://www.cslafactory.net
- Struggling with your Command Tables? VSCT PowerToy is here
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vsct files (and their predecessors, ctc files) can be tricky little beasts to get just right.
As Pablo notes, the VSCT PowerToy lets you browse through all the installed command tables to see what effect your package has had and also directly opens vsct and cto files.
You can also easily use Tools/Options to point to the experimental hive to see why things aren't working as you expect in your debug session.
- DSL on the Mersey
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Paul Kinlan dropped me a line about a talk he's doing on DSL and T4 at the upcoming Liverpool .Net User Group.
Find more event details here.
- Come hang out at VS Live in San Francisco
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Just a quick note that my colleague Anthony Cangialosi and I will be speaking about Visual Studio eXtensibility, DSL Tools, Visual Studio 2008 Shell and other similar goodness at VS Live in San Francisco on Monday. Hope to see some of you there or at the Visual Studio Extensibility booth.
Visual Studio Extensibility: How To Customize Visual Studio for Your Project
Monday, March 31, 10:15 a.m. to 11:30 a.m
- Tidbit for squeaking customization of DSL Add... menu items
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I've answered this a couple of times internally, so I thought I'd better post it.
The Add... menus in DSL Designers are dynamically generated from the ElementMergeDirective data you supply as part of your model.
For example, if you say that a domain class Door can be merged in to a domain class House then we'll dynamically generate an Add menu entry for Doors on Houses in the model explorer and on any compartment shape representation of House and Door.
This is handy, but our customization story here isn't too hot as the only way you can get in and modify this is by finding the "Add" menu, zapping it completely and putting your own entries in there instead. This is pretty heavy handed as you'll also have zapped the menu for "Add Chimney" and "Add RoseGarden" at the same time. See Duncan's post here for how to accomplish this.
A sneaky way around this limitation is to take advantage of the fact that we call the CanMerge method on the parent as part of deciding whether to show individual menu items.
As it happens, we pass slightly odd parameters to this method when we're calling it purely for the purposes of deciding whether to show a menu.
The signature for CanMerge looks like this (on the House class in our example)
protected override bool CanMerge(DslModeling::ProtoElementBase rootElement,
DslModeling::ElementGroupPrototype elementGroupPrototype)
When you're pasting or dragging prototypes from toolbox, the parameters contain "real" ProtoElements with real Ids.
However, when you're testing the hypothetical ability to paste some not-yet-created future item from an add menu, the parameters contain "fake" ProtoElements with zero Ids.
So if rootElement.ElementId is Guid.Zero then you know you're in a hypothetical test.
The menu building tests for both compartment and explorer are hypothetical , so if you return false on Guid.Zero, then the offending menu item should simply disappear from both places.
Not exactly blindingly obvious, but it's gotten a couple of teams out of a hole.
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- Is your job so bad?
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From Jim Glass...
A CRM Riff : 5 Reasons to Quit Complaining About Your Job
The first one gives me vertigo just sitting here.
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Job Humor
- Visual Studio Gallery is Live
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Soma has just announced that our new Gallery for all kinds of VS eXtensions is live.
Major props to Anthony Cangialosi, as he's been been the driving force behind making this happen.
You can find Anthony discussing the Gallery with Ken Levy on video at channel 9 here.
- New DSL Tools Videos Online
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I've just noticed that at the top of the Visual Studio Start Page RSS feed today are two groovy videos on DSL Tools - one on basics and one on more advanced customizations. And a really fun domain chosen - modeling the solar system!
How Do I: Create and Customize My Domain Specific Language?
In this video, Dylan Miles, shows you how to create and customize your own Domain Specific Language using Visual Studio DSL Tools. He shows you the basics of creating your own domain classes, changing the visual properties of shapes as well as adding your own custom properties.
Presented by Dylan Miles http://www.alchemysoftware.co.za on February 19, 2008
Length: 22 minutes 10 seconds
How Do I: Use Advanced Customization?
Learn how to override functionality in the generated code of your Domain Specific Language. Dylan Miles explains how using a custom constructor, custom storage for your shape and domain classes as well as hooking events to your shape classes.
Presented by Dylan Miles http://www.alchemysoftware.co.za on February 12, 2008
Length:26 minutes 8 seconds
Enjoy.
- XNA Studio and DSL Tools - Better Together
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I've been meaning to blog this for an age.
Over in Furtaspace (love that name), André points out that with the (relatively) recent release of XNA Studio 2.0, you can now use teh 2005 version of VDSL Tools to create model-driven game creation tooling.
As Andre says, "Sweet!"
And in somewhat more stop press news, turns out that André has joined Microsoft - welcome on board André. (Now why on earth didn't you come interview for the jobs on our team?)
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