IBlog<Johan>

Most Wanted: IronRuby Integration in Visual Studio 2010

jdanforth — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:16:14 GMT

This week the IronRuby team announced IronRuby version 1.0 RC at RubyConf 2009 and IR is really starting to shape up into something awesome when looking at compatibility and performance.

The blog to really, really follow if you’re interested in IronRuby is Jimmy Schemanti’s (PM and developer on the IronRuby team). He’s got up-to-date information on the project as well as good tips on how to make best use of IR in your other .NET projects.

In a couple of places on the Net, there’s been discussions and also deep concerns about the fact that there is no proper support for the Iron* languages inside Visual Studio. One interesting discussion is going on in the IronRuby mailing list –> http://www.mail-archive.com/ironruby-core@rubyforge.org/msg05124.html and another over at Sapphire Steel, who released an alpha version of IR integration in VS2008 –> http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Who-Needs-IronRuby

A couple of months ago, Matt Ward wrote a blog post about IronRuby integration in SharpDevelop 3.1. SharpDevelop being an open source IDE for the .NET platform which supports various project types and multiple programming languages. Today, this might be the best option for people who are used to the the programming support you normally get in Visual Studio.

Personally I would hate to see the thousands of hours from the IronRuby team and the wonderful community being spent on a product not used just because the lack of VS integration. It’s my personal view that most .NET developers have been totally spoiled by the wonderful support VS gives us. We’re used to getting project support, syntax highlightning, refactoring, F5 debugging and at least *some* intellisense.

I know that some people over at Microsoft is a bit disappointed in the community (IronRuby is a kind of an Open Source project after all) for not doing something in VS for IronRuby already – Sapphire shows is possible for sure, and it should be even “less hard” in VS2010 – but I think I know why. Coding up a good VS integration with the features I listed above is NOT a walk in the park to get right. We’re talking thousands of hours that MIGHT go down the drain if Microsoft eventually releases something themselves.

For a while now there’s been a suggestion on Microsoft Connect for IronRuby integration into VS2010, which has now become the most up-voted feature request for VS2010!

A couple of days ago, Jimmy commented this on his own blog post:

VS integration will happen eventually; we've been focusing on the languages up until now. After the 1.0 is released we'll probably have some time to make the VS integration. However, I'm a little disappointed in the community for not making this already ...

And yesterday Jimmy wrote:

After 1.0 is released, we’ll probably take a bit of a break, but then look to do some features we didn’t get to finish in 1.0, as well as Visual Studio Integration, since it’s the highest voted feature for VS2010.

So, there you got it. It WILL happen eventually, I wish it will be sooner than later and I hope to see the same kind of short release cycles we’ve seen for IronRuby. :D

Weeko – MEF and WPF to plug in Tool Windows into Visual Studio 2010

jdanforth — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:16:39 GMT

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.

Some Good Feedback for Writespace

jdanforth — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:34:02 GMT

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?

Writespace Updated with Command Line Version and Some IronRuby Fun

jdanforth — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:47:41 GMT

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!

SQL Azure Explorer on Channel 9

jdanforth — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 10:25:17 GMT

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 ;)

Custom Caret “cheat” in WPF TextBox

jdanforth — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:13:29 GMT

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.

Source code for sample

SQL Azure Explorer Addin for VS2010 Beta 1

jdanforth — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:23:10 GMT

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 :)

Visual Studio 2008 Web Test Not Recording on 64-bit Windows 7

jdanforth — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:49:06 GMT

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.

Windows 7 RC Feels Very Stable

jdanforth — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:04:34 GMT

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.

Windows 7 Release Candidate Availability

jdanforth — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 07:49:09 GMT

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…

Restored 64-bit Windows 7 Beta from Windows Home Server Backup on a DELL Laptop

jdanforth — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:25:26 GMT

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…

7-Zip on 64 Bit Windows 7 Beta

jdanforth — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:26:02 GMT

I’m having problems in my 64 bit Windows 7 beta with the built in support for unzipping zip-files containing *lots* of files. It often hangs near the end and I have to reboot to sort things out.

Downloaded 64 bit version of 7-Zip and it work fine – so far. You might want to try that one out if you have the same problems. Eventually it may also hang, but I’ll try it for a while and shout out if I notice any probs.

Writespace in Other Languages

jdanforth — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:29:24 GMT

Some time ago I noticed a peak in Writespace downloads and I started to get some emails from people with requests for new features and stuff, which is fun. I saw from the stats that Lifehacker had a couple of articles on Writespace, as well as Danish PC-World, some Japanese site (I have no idea what the site is about :) and a few other places.

I had no idea if Writespace actually worked in Japanese, but apparently it does!


Lifehacker.com	Pcworld.dk		Moongift.jp

If I get some time for it I’ll release a Word 2003 version and add a few of the requested new features.

Fill a Select/Option from Json with jQuery

jdanforth — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:19:02 GMT

More jQuery and Json…

To fill a listbox (select) with items from a Json call.

I got this helper class to handle the options/items:

public class SelectOption
{
    public String Value { get; set; }
    public String Text { get; set; }
}

A sample action/method in ASP.NET MVC that returns Json:

public JsonResult GetJson()
{
    var list = new List<SelectOption>
                   {
                       new SelectOption { Value = "1", Text = "Aron" },
                       new SelectOption { Value = "2", Text = "Bob" },
                       new SelectOption { Value = "3", Text = "Charlie" },
                       new SelectOption { Value = "4", Text = "David" }
                   };
    return Json(list);
}

Some HTML and jQuery to fill the list at page load:


    <select id="MyList" />

    <script type="text/javascript">

        $(document).ready(function() {
            $.getJSON("/Json/GetJson", null, function(data) {
                $("#MyList").addItems(data);
            });
        });

        $.fn.addItems = function(data) {
            return this.each(function() {
                var list = this;
                $.each(data, function(index, itemData) {
                    var option = new Option(itemData.Text, itemData.Value);
                    list.add(option);
                });
            });
        };

        $("#MyList").change(function() {
            alert('you selected ' + $(this).val());
        });

    </script>

Json, jQuery and ASP.NET MVC

jdanforth — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:01:20 GMT

I’m stacking a few things here related to Json, jQuery and ASP.NET MVC so that I can get to them later on.

JQuery to grab some Json when a web page is loaded:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $.getJSON("/MyController/MyJsonAction", null, function(data) {
        //do stuff with data here
    });
});

The smallish code in the ASP.NET MVC controller:

public JsonResult GetJson()
{
    return Json(GetList());
}

It’s possible to use anonymous types with Json() as well, which is very useful but may be harder to unit test.