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Wishing for dev10: Get rid of PLK, SLK, DLK and anything ?LK

Today one very annoying thing you've to do when you want to deploy your Visual Studio Package extension is to get a PLK or "Package Load Key" from Microsoft.

This is a painful process which can be divided into two equally painful parts:

Pain #1: Get yourself a PLK

For this you have to use a MS Website which used to be really bad at doing its job. For example, data you entered for your key was not available for reviewing later on and sometimes you never received the email with the requested key... we're talking very basic stuff, which was just not working properly.

The good news is they replaced the old website (delete C:\QuickAndDirtyWebAppCodedInFiveMinutes\*.*) with this single page which besides being much more friendlier than the original website it also... works!!

Pain #2: Debug your PLK

So after struggling (if you had to use the old website) to get yourself a PLK you still were left with the job of debugging it. Which wouldn't be that bad if it wasn't because the really poor support offered by Visual Studio logging then attempting to load your packages which basically was reduced to:

"Hey, I cannot load your package, sorry!".

A package load failure could be caused for a variety of reasons which Visual Studio can currently detect but just logs them in an unfortunately generic way. This requires of some obscure PLK troubleshooting time (some of it very hard to guess as "Is the crypto service running?") that translates to wasted hours.

And to add more to an already unfriendly process Visual Studio 2008 has three different kinds of Load Keys:

1) Package Load Key (PLK) to deploy your VS packages to end users
2) Developer Load Key (DLK) installed by the VS SDK so you can develop and run packages without a proper PLK in place
3) Shell Load Key (SLK) to deploy your VS-Shell based applications

My whishes for dev10 (or "Visual Studio 2010" if you like longer names) are the following:

1) Please don't invent a 4th ?LK to add to the previous three, there are more than enough already!
2) Please just kill the existing three key types and remove extensibility developers the need to go through this pain at all.

Infacta & GroupMail: They Suck Big Time

I wanted to post this to alert other people about this company.

I brought GroupMail Business Edition for $299 several months ago, it was version v5.2.0.54 then. I never got a chance to use it until now, so I headed to the Infacta website to download the bits and I found a funny:

"Your access has expired, you need to purchase extended protection to keep access"

Expired? My access?

So I got the support page and tried contacted Infacta through one those ugly designed web-based Contact Form, needless to say I never received a reponse back.

I then decided a phone call should work better so I looked up Infacta's telephone number in the US 1-866-641-8281.

A nice lady gently told me that the person who could help me was OOF until the next day. Not a problem, I already wasted some time here, but I can wait one more day.

Another phone call, and... the same story again "this person is OOF". Ok... I will call tomorrow...

Needless to say, my 3rd call didn't have any luck, they guy was still not there. And what got me a little bit more upset was a "He usually work only in the mornings" (why in the world I wasn't told about this before?)

With the last traces of patience I was left with I said: "Ok, I only need a simple download location, this couldn't be that hard, there should be other people knowing where I can download this from".

No luck again, "I'm only a receptionist" and "there is only one person from Infacta working here" were the two sentences that killed my last hopes.

Almost I week lost... let's email them now... which I should have probably done so to begin with but one would think a quick phone call should do faster...

A funny guy from sales responds to my query indicating that "You need to pay $85/year for a protection upgrade to get your download link restored. This is because you have v5.2.0.54 and current version is v5.2.0.65"

What?!?! C'mon... I don't want any freaking upgrades nor protection, I'm asking only for exactly the same freaking installer corresponding to the version I purchased months ago".

You want to charge me a couple of bucks for a download as a "media" reposition, ok good go ahead, I will still feel you're ripping me off... but $85/year... to get access to the freaking bits I already purchased...

Bottom-line of the story: if you're ever brave enough to do business with Infacta just make sure you do download the bits you're purchasing ASAP otherwise they will attempt to rip you off selling additional upgrade-protection-whatever you don't need nor want.

T4 Editor v1.0 RTM finally available!

After lots and lots of hard work I'm very proud to announce that my team shipped v1.0 of the Clarius T4 Editor today.

We've been insanely struggling to get the bits finished during the last few months; you know, extending Visual Studio for simple stuff is far from trivial let alone extending it in some crazy ways like reusing the existing C# infrastructure. Nothing but lots of "fun"...

I've received lots of pings from people asking how the editor will be available, so this is the story:

We're offering a Community edition, featuring basic T4 IntelliSense and syntax coloring, for free as in beer. And we're offering a paid Professional edition too, including a few more extra features plus our King feature which is support for embedded C# code blocks. If you're interested into finding how these two editions compare you can find a summary here.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so I'm trying to save some typing by using this picture:

Now imagine how much your productivity will improve and what are you going to do with all the time you will save thanks to using the T4 Editor. :)

VSX Devcon: All about extending Visual Studio

If you are into extending the best IDE ever you already know that is not an easy task.

You will find challenges all day (some days just too many of them...) and you may spend an entire day (or a couple of them...) trying to accomplish even the most trivial things. Don't feel frustrated, you're not alone.

The good news is there is a dedicated team trying to change this and they've put up a 2-day conference filled with exclusive content on extending VS.

The admission price is an incredible low $100 so you really need a good excuse not to register.

At least four guys from Clarius (including me) will be attending it. If you're planning to do so too drop me a note so we can share our "extending VS" experiences, the good ones and the bad ones.

T4 Editor: some teasing pictures!

We're receiving emails everyday asking us about the status of the T4 Editor. The news is we're still working on it and we're making some great progress!

Just so you can check the wait is being worth it, I'm posting here a few screenshots that showcase the main feature we're working on, which is full support for embedded code blocks, that is, the same great support you get today from the ASP.NET editor when embedding C# or VB code.

Enjoy!

Troubleshooting GAX/GAT installation issues

For all of you out there working on Software Factories or just automating Visual Studio using GAX/GAT we've put up a small tool named GAX Troubleshooter (yes, we didn't spend much time on naming it).

Upgrading versions of GAX, installing and uninstalling guidance packages has been usually a bit of pain (ok, a lot of pain in several cases), if you add a new version of Visual Studio to the picture (yes, VS 2008), this may confuse things even more.

Usually, if you properly install GAX and then any guidance package and then you uninstall any of them before uninstalling GAX itself, you're safe.

But... (and yes, there is always a but) people often delete guidance packages before uninstalling them which then forces you to play manual tricks in order to make GAX happy to uninstall.

Is for this later case that we put up this little tool: it will report key registry entries, files, etc regarding to GAX. And with this information it should be much easier to diagnose what may be causing a failed installation or un-installation.

You can download the tool from here, and this is the place to post the generated log file if you want to get help making sense out of it.

T4 Editor beta released!

After a few weeks of lots of hard work we were finally able to release a pretty stable release of our T4 Editor out to the community at http://www.t4editor.net.

It currently support VS 2005 and VS 2008 beta 2 and has most (but not all yet) of the bells and whistles you would expect from a nice and integrated editor in Visual Studio (meaning IntelliSense, syntax coloring, region collapsing, etc).

If you're into anything like DSL, GAX or Software Factories then this is a must have for you.

And if you're using any of the code generation tools out there and you've haven't heard of T4 yet, then it's probably time you give it a look...

You can go directly to the download page and give it a try, I would love to hear your feedback if you do so!

Introducing Silverlight Streaming Library (SLSL)

A weekend a couple of months ago I coded a quick and dirty spike on a C# library to wrap the Silverlight Streaming REST APIs.

Using this library you can add, replace and delete File Sets (Applications) and files in your Silverlight Streaming account. You can also retrieve information that is not directly exposed by the REST APIs as size of applications and your whole account.

I've created a CodePlex project for hosting the project at: http://codeplex.com/slsl (code compiles fine in VS2005 and VS2008 beta 2).

If you're writing any client for accessing the Silverlight Streaming servers then definitely this library is worth checking!

As soon as I find another slot of free time I'll be posting a VS toolwindow that has a nice UI and uses the SLSL library to access the data for your account.

Enjoy!

VS: simply things which are incredibly hard

There are some very clear examples out there about what I mean when I talk about VS obscurity being a major pain for getting people extending the platform and trying to make my dream come true.

As a rule of thumb people should know that if demostrating incredibly basics things takes you more than a few words and a trivial code snippet then most probably something is wrong.

There is a post by Dr. Ex on how to detect when a toolwindow is closing, it's 52 paragraph and 509 words in length, pretty lengthly, ugh?

What this should have been instead?

mytoolwindow.Hide +=  new EventHander(hide_handler);

There is another post from Sara Ford that touches how to insert some text in the editor, it's 20 paragraphs and 300 words in length. If you have the estomatch to go throught it you will notice all sort of crazy stuff like you having to do your own memory managament (flashback to 1978!):

IntPtr pText = Marshal.StringToCoTaskMemAuto(text);

try

{

      textLines.ReplaceLines(0, 0, endLine, endCol, pText, len, null);

}

finally

{

      Marshal.FreeCoTaskMem(pText);

}

What this should have been instead?

myeditor.Text = "foo";

Luckily enough both, Dr. Ex and Sara, write their posts with a salt of humor which I don't think it's a coincidence but a technique for trying to eliminate the idea of suicide from their weblog readers while they're reading.

I'm fine with their approach as long as they understand that there isn't really anything funny about it and that this really, really, really begs for a change sooner than later.

The VSX team is listening too

I remember the time (3 years ago) when I was dogfooding latest ASP.Net bits and entering bugs like hell. I was also publicly posting most of my findings about what I did and didn't like and I always got nothing but a very good reaction from the ASP.Net team which was always open to feedback.

Now I'm spending most of my time inside Visual Studio so they are the target of my daily grins.

Ken Levy, PM on the VSX team, points from the official VSX weblog to my entry about VS being obscure.

While it doesn't mean they agree with me nor they will make the changes I am crying for, it doesn mean for one thing that they're listening. And that is always good thing.