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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.

The new VSX logo: what exactly is that thing?

It doesn't have the VS look, it doesn't have the new cool Expression-wave look... nor the Silverlight one... nor the Live one...

It is... a..., it is... the new... VSX logo (disclaimer: not closing your eyes at this time may hurt them):

I can anticipate some of the promotions that could be run for the new logo:

"...Get a free VSX t-shirt with the new VSX logo on it, and we will even send you a $10 check if you're brave enough to wear it!..." :-)

Visual Studio SDK: Improve my productivity by removing some docs

Talking about obscure...

Take a quick look at the documentation for IVsTextManager.RegisterView method.

The main description for the method reads: "Method information is not provided."

Ok... there isn't much I can guess about the method from that so let's see what the arguments this method takes are about in order to help the guessing game. Its signature is:

int RegisterView (
	[InAttribute] IVsTextView pView,
	[InAttribute] IVsTextBuffer pBuffer
)

What are pView and pBuffer about? Let's check that doco again:

Parameters

pView

Do not use.

pBuffer

Do not use.

Does "do not use" really means "I've no idea what should go here"? Or is it more like "this is used internally by VS and maybe we should have said that at the method description where we originally said 'method information is not provided'"?

At this point you may be lead to believe whoever put this page online just doesn't care about your time. I mean, you took the time to search for this method, you were directed to MSDN, you open and read the help and you get zero information at all. I don't think this is the case. I'm guessing there is some automated tool that produces a million pages based on XML comments or something similar and that's the reason why some non-sense pages like this one end up online.

Based on this I can think of a way to automatically improve VSX developer's productivity out there: JUST remove pages like this one. You can save me a minute or two by doing so.

GAX/GAT for Orcas: coming soon!

If you're into extending Visual Studio then there are good news for you.

Grigori Melnik, Product Manager for GAX/GAT from Microsoft p&p, has announced there will be a compatible version that runs on Orcas pretty soon.

“The Shell” (not a Hollywood production)

The announcement at TechEd 07 seems to have been received well by the blogsphere. For example Pablo is saying “WOW... finally extending Visual Studio will be much easier…”.

I’ve to admit, I don’t find this near that exciting, sorry.

We have had Visual Studio PPE edition before. And we already had an idea of what can be done with the “shell”; basically if you’ve installed Team Explorer in a box without Visual Studio on it you’ve already experience “the shell”.

So, Victor, what’s really new here? Thanks for asking!

In my opinion the most important thing to notice is that they have now removed the “expensive” part; it is nothing but great news to find out that you will be able to distribute royalty-free the “shell’ with your custom extension.

But the “obscure” it still there. There is nothing new regarding helping you writing these extensions in order for you to have something at all that you could ship royalty free at the end of the day.

So, how many people will actually take immediate advantage of this? Those who are *already* experienced enough to write their own extensions and couldn’t afford a non-royalty free license before. Take a pen and a very small piece of paper and that should be enough to write down all their names.

Overall, I’m happy as this is still a good move, but there is much more work to be done (which can be read too as: I’m not happy as I could be…)

I would really kill to see news in the direction of putting some light into the “obscure”.