Victor Garcia Aprea

New Blog About Code Generation With T4 in Visual Studio!

vga — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:44:00 GMT

While developing the Visual T4 Code Generator edition my team and I are constantly having discussions on how the best code generation tool in earth should look like and also about more “abstract” code generation chores not necessarily related to the product we’re developing.

So it occurred to me (yes, I’m that clever…) that we should take our internal document drafts from our internal wiki and put all this stuff into a blog (of course we will remove the bad language first) to make our plans more public and gather community feedback while we’re at it.

In this new blog you will find posts by Adrian, Joaquin, Jose and me (and if I get lucky I may get other Clarius people to blog too)

Please subscribe and let us know what do you think, thanks!

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

vga — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:24:37 GMT

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.

T4 Editor v1.0 RTM finally available!

vga — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:23:00 GMT

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

vga — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:37:26 GMT

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 to not 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.

VS: simply things which are incredibly hard

vga — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 08:19:57 GMT

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

vga — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 08:19:57 GMT

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.

T4 Editor beta released!

vga — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 08:19:00 GMT

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!

Visual Studio SDK: Improve my productivity by removing some docs

vga — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 08:19:00 GMT

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!

vga — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 02:22:00 GMT

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)

vga — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 01:50:00 GMT

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”.

Dreaming of a huge Visual Studio Community

vga — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 01:40:00 GMT

What is the hardcore way of extending Visual Studio: VSIP.

And what are the first things that come to mind when you think of “VSIP”: expensive and obscure. Expensive because it used to be 10k/year and obscure because its COM roots and it’s very poor (close to inexistent) documentation.

You tell me how do you build a huge community around expensive and obscure? You just simple can’t. I believe the past years were more than enough to prove this.

So, someone at Microsoft realized about this fact and VSX was created. A new name is always a good thing; better yet if it is a TLA and begins or ends with ‘X’, you can hardly beat that J

What VSX is about (besides the cool name)? The official word won’t tell much but this is what I’m noticing: new useful samples in the VSSDK using managed code and improved documentation (or at least, part of it). The samples source code is still a good place where to find code comments that will give you much more information than what the docs will tell you.

Can you build a community around VSX? Although this is surely an improvement over expensive and obscure, IMO, this is still not enough.

Why?

Because all of the “obscure” it’s still there. Because you still need to mess with COM interfaces all the time and the versioning craziness like “IVsComponentEnumeratorFactory3” and native structures and enumerations that were coded when naming like “__VSMEPROPID2. VSMEPROPID_LAST2 ” made any sense. Let alone the VBisms you can find in today’s DTE automation layer (like indexes starting at 1 instead of 0, etc). Also, I don’t want 45 different and incompatible ways of doing the same thing.

It is 2007 now. I want a nice and clean OO framework that I could proudly look at without my eyes being hurt and that I can confidently build upon it.

Enough criticism now and let’s add some constructiveness to this post.

What needs to be done?

1) Ideally: give me a new and fully managed IDE. Get your internal teams to rewrite their packages against this new IDE. Get your partners up to speed too. Even if you need to name this thing “Visual Studio 2011” I’m still fine with it.

2) Give me a Visual Studio Framework (think of MPF on steroids). This framework should totally abstract me from the fact of knowing what’s going on at the metal level. Not a single trace of COM or VB automation, just clean and simple OO code I could code against.

I can’t really see a huge Visual Studio community taking off and growing exponentially without either 1) or 2) in place.

My Love / Hate relationship with Visual Studio

vga — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 01:37:00 GMT

Back in 2001 I used to know the ASP.NET bits from top to bottom getting to its internal (thanks Reflector!) to a very down-to-the-metal level. I could recite the page lifecycle from top of my head, tell you what you may being doing wrong regarding it without actually looking at your code (my 4000+ posts answering questions at the newsgroups are a living testimony of this) and I also contributed to the ASP.Net team with lots and lots of bug reports, besides writing a couple of articles for different ASP.NET topics in MSDN and having co-authored two books too. We can say I was breathing ASP.Net at that time and for the next couple following years.

Now, in 2007, as some of you may already know I’ve been working -silently I should say, as my blogging activity pretty much sucked- almost exclusively extending Visual Studio for the last 3+ years.

What follow are a few paragraphs of how I feel about this (yes, this is the point where you can stop reading!).

Visual Studio is a tool I love to use.

It’s has been enhanced over the years with new features you could really feel.

As a small sample of this there is IntelliSense all over the place: code editor, watch window, immediate window, and the terrific work done by the ASP.Net team on editing HTML pages that can be mixed with C# or VB while retaining the same experience as if you were editing a plain C# or VB code file.

Visual Studio is a tool I hate to extend.

Due to its original architecture and its need to support lots of legacy code there isn’t yet a clean and nice managed approach to extend it. Lately (and thanks heaven!) there have been lots of moves that seem oriented to make this change a reality: VSX, Shell, etc. I’ll talk about these in separate posts.

That said, I’m still very happy and enjoying my daily work. Why? Because I love challenges.

And let me tell you -in case you still didn’t know- extending Visual Studio is a hell of a new challenge each day!!

Adopting Software Factories Today == Clarius SFT

vga — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:11:00 GMT

We just released the June 2007 CTP of our Clarius SFT including some new cool features to help in shortening the existing gap between current Software Factories-related technologies, like GAX/GAT and DSL Tools.

This toolkit will help you in getting things done today.

It contains features that will abstract you enough from the boring details of how to make the plumbing required for integrating the existing technologies, letting you concentrate on the specific domain of your Software Factory.

There is a runtime part extending GAX/GAT and DSL runtimes covering common scenarios for which there is no built-in support: as scripting, eventing, etc.

And, a design-time part, offering tools as a Recipe Designer, Recipe Binder, T4 Editor and lots of wizards.

With more than 8000+ downloads already and counting it’s becoming a must have tool for every developer working on developing factories today.

So, if you’re into Software Factories development and you haven’t tried SFT yet, you’re missing a key part of the picture!

Adding Commands to a DSL from a 10,000ft view

vga — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:39:00 GMT

The DSL Tools are a huge improvement towards getting a VS designer up and running in no time.

They make a good job of keeping you abstracted at a 10,000ft view from the inner workings of a Visual Studio designer. You drag and drop shapes all around, defining your domain model and its graphical representation. You set properties here and there. And… you’re ready to go!

You now have thousands and thousands of automatically generated code implementing a VS designer which would have took you weeks to write if you went from scratch. That’s nice.

Now, let’s say you’re the kind of developer that likes to push the envelope and you come with the very wild idea of adding a menu command to the designer surface or a given shape of your DSL. Oh, yes, you’re wild.

At this point if you were an airplane you would have crashed. The nice 10,000ft altitude and the “I don’t have to worry about the dirty details” that you were used to while designing your domain model have changed for the feeling of hitting hard the ground.

You need to follow several steps procedure which includes things as dealing with a C++ preprocessor and knowing in lots of detail one of the most arcane format that Microsoft may have invented, the obscure world of Command Table definitions.

So, you’re already thinking of hiring a skilled senior C++ developer so you can add your menu command? Well, that’s not required if you’re willing to put the time to learn lots of non-interesting stuff about how to define a command, but if you have the time, you will eventually make it work (and that’s because you’re a wild developer, remember that).

With SFT we try to keep you at the 10,000ft for adding commands too. And in our latest public drop we’ve included an enhanced DSL Recipe Binder Wizard that will do the magic for you.

It allows you to choose between binding a command to a built-in shape (the designer surface, a link, etc) or one of your custom shapes (your foo shape), and specifying on which kind of selection you want your command to appear: single, multiple or any? Moreover, you want your command to appear only for those Foo shapes whose Bar whose property start with a ‘C’? Easy enough, click a checkbox specifying you want to customize the selection logic and you will get a partial class with an override method taking a Foo shape where you can write the single line of code required to check the Bar property.

This is how it looks like:

Trust me, this is as easy as it gets.

Deploying Guidance Packages and DSLs the easy way

vga — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:19:00 GMT

Let’s do a 15 seconds recap on what currently GAX/GAT and DSL Tools offer regarding deployment.

GAT : uses Visual Studio Setup projects (can you feel the pain already?) to deploy your custom guidance packages. If you don’t need anything beyond the very simply basics this setup will work nice even if you modify your guidance package sources after you created the setup, something that sounds basic enough but it’s not true for DSL Setup projects. Now, do you want to customize any part of the Guidance Package setup process with some detail? Good luck!

DSL Tools : uses WiX-based setups (hurray!) but… they’re as “static” as something can get. If you play with your DSL Tools and you afterwards create the Setup project high chances are that you end up with a non-working setup that needs manual editing, that’s not nice at all (after all: can’t you just read my DSL project at Setup creation time and play clever outputting something that works?). Even if you manage to create a working Setup (meaning basically you didn’t touch a thing from the original created DSL Package project) it will break as soon as you need any customization. Yes, you can try to learn the setup domain model that is there and update it manually every time you make a change, but... who really wants to do this?

Sounds bad enough already? Let’s complicate things a bit more. Let’s say your solution includes more than one guidance package and more than one DSL Tools, the successfully Web Services Software Factory from p&p, in its latest incarnation v3 (under development), is an example of this, last time I checked it included a couple of guidance packages and a couple DSL designers. You want to deploy this beast? Be my guest, you will only need to ask your users to install 4 or 5 different MSIs...

We notice this and took action in SFT by introducing a new SFT Setup project feature which lets you choose from all the guidance packages and DSLs found in your solution and get a single WiX-based project that generates a single MSI that will install as many guidance packages and DSLs as you wish; this is how it looks like:

All you need to do is a few mouse clicks, no manual editing required, auto-updating of the setup project, and no custom domain model to learn about.

Can this get even better? Let me know how: vga -AT- clariusconsulting -DOT- net.

Want to learn more about this feature? Check Adrian’s blog who developed it.