IBlog<Johan>

Today I opened up a new Codeplex project called “Weeko”, which is a Sioux name for “pretty”.

Weeko is an experiment which uses MEF to easily plug in tool windows into VS2010. The tool windows are developed as ordinary WPF UserControls. Install the Visual Studio extension and drop your user control assembly into the extensions directory of Visual Studio and it will show up inside the IDE.

This is how it can look with a couple of sample “addins” – The Rss feed, Twitter feed and a digital clock are all WPF User Controls which are exported and imported using MEF – Managed Extensibility Framework.

Feel free to check it out and if you got some ideas for improvements please let me know. I’m thinking about how to better manage available plugins, load/unload etc.

It’s been a while since I actually looked at the Codeplex statistics for Writespace, but it seems that people keep downloading it and that’s always fun! So far Writespace has been downloaded over 4.000 times which is peanuts compared to other open source tools, but perhaps I helped some people get more productive and that feels good!

Following the top referring sites I can see that this simple addin for Word gets some good reviews from people that compares it with other similar tools. One of the best articles I’ve seen so far is the one by Rob Oakes, which he calls On Writing – Software that cuts out distraction and clutter where he compares DarkRoom, WriteRoom, Writespace and PyRoom. They are all very similar to each other.

What’s not so cool is that Writespace is an open source project, and it would have been fun to get some patches or help from other developers. Of the 4.000 downloads, I’m sure there are a whole lot of .NET developers that know their XAML well. I’ve got some feedback for ideas, one guy I know made some changes but didn’t send me code or a patch… pity. If you extend open source software, shouldn’t you share that? Maybe it’s too hard to create a patch?

I had a few minutes to fix a few issues and release an updated version (1.3) of Writespace – the full screen editing environment addin for Word.

So what’s new? I removed the annoying illuminated animation for row and column when typing. Added F4 shortcut for the Options dialog. Also added a command line program and a sample ditto to run Writespace with IronRuby.

IronRuby can be downloaded from http://ironruby.codeplex.com 

The command line programs are optional downloads, but it seems to run pretty well if pinned to the Windows 7 TaskBar:

Have fun!

Our SQL Azure Explorer Addin for VS2010, which is on Codeplex was mentioned on the  Last Week on Channel 9 show, which is cool. Made the download stats peek even though it’s for VS2010 Beta 1 only and you need to have an SQL Azure CTP account. 

That show is one of the best for people like me who need to keep up with the latest stuff happening on the Windows and .NET front.

I need to get some time and refactor the data access layer. It works, but it’s not consistent and could use more integration tests. Or I’ll let it be and just work on new features, which is way funnier ;)

I’ve seen people ask for custom Carets in the WPF TextBox, like in insert mode and you want to have a block caret or underscore. Some say it’s going to be possible/easier to do this in .NET 4.0, but until then, there are some simple cheats you can do to add it yourself, but it will need some tweaking. In this test I’ve put a Canvas on top of the TextBox, on which I draw the custom caret and move it when keys are pressed in the TextBox. If you absolutely need this behavior you can probably tweak it to work, but movement, drawing and all that depends on the font face and size.

In my sample code, the custom caret is invisible to start with, and only drawn when in overwrite mode. The drawing is kind of jerky when using the arrow keys and home, end etc, but I think it can be fixed. One way would be to make the built in caret the same color as the TextBox background, like described by Lester in his blog post.

Me and Dag König just released the alpha version of a (so far) small Codeplex project we’ve been working on for the last week or so – an SQL Azure Explorer Addin for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1.

The reasons for this project are several, but mostly to learn more about VS2010, how to create addins for it, dig into SQL Azure and at the same time learn some WPF and XAML.

The addin is a VSIX package and easily installed in VS2010 by just downloading and double clicking it.

Here’s a sample screenshot of the explorer and the integrated SQL Editor:

If you got VS2010 Beta 1 and some SQL Azure databases you work with, please download and feedback. I’m sure Microsoft will eventually support SQL Azure in the built-in server explorer, but as I said, this is for fun (it’s great fun to code addins) and the code might be useful for other future projects :)

I was about to record a web test in Visual Studio 2008 Team System today, and the recorder refused to record anything. And the Recorder “bar” in IE 8 was not showing. After some digging around, the issue was fixed by deleting a few registry keys. Found it on Michael Taute's Blog : Diagnosing and fixing Web Test recorder bar issues.

Quote from his blog page:

Vista caches the list of explorer bars you have available and the recorder bar was not included in your list. The fix is to force Windows to rebuild that cache. To do this, first make sure you have all Internet Explorer instances shut down, then open the 32 bit registry editor and delete the following keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Discardable\PostSetup\Component Categories\{00021493-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Discardable\PostSetup\Component Categories\{00021494-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}

[Note: by default, the 32 bit registry editor is located in %WINDIR%\SysWow64\RegEdt32.exe]

The next time you boot Internet Explorer, your explorer bar cache will be rebuilt and the recorder bar should be available.

I upgraded to Win7rc as fast as I could from the beta and pretty much all the problems I had on the beta are gone! I’ve never experienced a beta OS as stable as this one, it’s nothing short of impressive.

Hangs on reboot/shutdown are gone.

Annoying stuttering sound probs are gone.

File copy probs are gone.

Screen update probs gone.

I’m running 64-bit on a DELL Precision M4400 and the funny thing is that think I’ve not installed any extra drivers except for the touchpad and the initial network drivers, and it runs like a charm. It was a nightmare to get it working properly on 64-bit Vista, even when it came pre-installed with it from DELL! (Shame on you DELL to ship a box that doesn’t even run properly on the pre-installed software!!)

I will have to install the extra software to get the built-in 3G mobile network running and that was kind of tricky on the beta, and the finger-print reader I’m not even going to bother with.

Glad to read about the upcoming RC release of Windows 7. Just wondering how I should “migrate” to the RC from by current beta as I’ve spent days and days to get it in pretty good shape. Lots of job, but Win7 is just worth it.

From the Askperf webby:

We now have some dates that we can share with you.  The RC build is slated to be available for download by MSDN / TechNet subscribers this Thursday (April 30, 2009).  Broader, public availability will begin the following Tuesday (May 5, 2009).  If you haven’t already started using Windows 7, there are plenty of changes since the Beta release.  You can read more about these changes in the following posts from the Engineering Windows 7 blog: Some Changes Since Beta for the RC and A few more changes from Beta to RC…

The HD of the new DELL Precision M4400 I have crashed, burned and died yesterday. I heard the screams 3 rooms away while drinking my morning coffee. It was horrific.

Luckily it was powered on during the night, so the Windows Home Server (WHS) had a full backup. Had a few probs though:

- the recovery cd didn’t have network drivers for my LAN card

- the drivers stored in the special folder on the backup were 64-bit, which isn’t supported by the recovery cd (DUH!!)

- had to download 32-bit drivers from DELL and put on USB drive

Tip: make sure your c-drive matches the size of the backup, and create a “dummy” FAT recovery partition on your new HD which mimics the DELL RECOVERY partition. Also, make sure your USB drive is disconnected once you don’t need it anymore. Make sure it’s disconnected before you finish the backup. Also, eject the recovery cd when rebooting, just to be sure! I had to do the restore 3 times before it managed to make my c-drive bootable! Quite annoying…