June 2010 - Posts
The new Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools bring a new Add Reference dialog that completely replaces the classic one when you click the familiar Add Reference command:
It seems like a nice dialog that is more aligned with the new Add New dialog and the Extension Manager one. But for this particular case, I believe it's awfully overkill (what's the use of that right sidebar? what's the use for the categories of assemblies split between Framework and Extensions?).
The (also new) Search References extension which I blogged about earlier, gives you the familiar classic dialog enhanced with the must-have Search capability:...
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If you have been using VS2010 for any significant amount of time, you surely came across the awkward, slow and hard to use Add Reference dialog. Despite some (apparent) improvements over the VS2008 behavior, in its current form it's even LESS usable than before. A brief non-exhaustive summary of the typical grief with this dialog is:
- Scrolling a list of *hundreds* of entries? (300+ typically)
- No partial matching when typing: yes, you can type in the list to get to the desired entry, but the matching is performed in an exact manner, from the beginning of the assembly name. So, to get to the (say) "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Settings" assembly, you actually have to type the first two segments in their entirety before starting to type "Settings"....
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In the latest and greatest version of Visual Studio, MEF plays a critical role, one that makes extending VS much more fun than it ever was.
So typically, you just [Export] something, and then someone [Import]s it and that's it. MEF in all its glory kicks in and gets all your dependencies satisfied.
Cool, you say, so let's now import ITextTemplating and have some T4-based codegen going! Ah, if only it was that easy. Turns out by default, none of the VS built-in services are exposed to MEF, apparently because there wasn't enough time to analyze the lifetime, initialization, dependencies, etc. for each one before launch, which makes perfect sense. You don't want to blindly export everything now just in case. There's also the whole VS package initialization thing which in this version of VS is not so transparently integrated with the MEF publishing side (i.e. a MEF export from a package can get instantiated before its owning package, and in fact, the package can remain unloaded forever and the export will continue to be visible to anyone)....
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For documentation purposes, I just draw the following UML sequence diagrams for the “Astoria” pipeline, using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate:
For a single-entity (or non-batched) request, this is the sequence:
For a batch request, this is the sequence instead:
DataService component is your own DataService<T>-derived class, and DataService.ProcessingPipeline refers to its ProcessingPipeline property pipeline events.
/kzu
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