TechEd – Day 3
Two talks scheduled, two talks completed. We started the day with a “Cabana” session at 8:30am. I really liked this format, and we may do it more often. Ken stood in front of the group, giving demos of third party products, showing off what those companies have done with automation and packages inside of VS. Meanwhile, Allen, Chetan, and myself implemented features, live, while attendees were welcome to look over our shoulders as we wrote the code. Doug, the architect of the group, walked among us over viewing the work we were doing. At the end, we got up and showed off what we had written.
Allen wrote a language service that did the colorization based on .NET regular expressions. Chetan wrote a tool that allowed users to annotate code. I wrote an Add-in designer, open an Add-in, and you could drag & drop commands onto the designer surface, set properties on the command, and those properties would be reflected in your command. You could also drag .NET controls (either ones from the .NET framework on user controls) onto the designer and tool windows would be created from the control.
The second talk was done by Ken and myself. We implemented an Add-in that would allow you subscribe to, and then read RSS feeds from within Visual Studio. The posting I made earlier today, about keeping Add-ins from loading, was actually made on stage and used to demonstrate notifications within the task list of a new posting. The second demo we gave was a very simple text editor (language service for those of you familiar with the VSIP SDK) that searched for comments and then colorized them, showing just how easy it is to get started with the VSIP SDK. Lastly we showed my IL language service and IL project that I have been building for the 2nd edition of our book (no definite word that we will get a 2nd edition, but we are hopeful). The only real problem that we had was, while showing off the IL editor, my keyboard stopped responding meaning I could not show off everything. While these could always go better, we think it went well.
Over the next week, we will be packaging up the source to the demos that we wrote and post them to the web. I will let you know when we have them ready.
Tomorrow’s schedule: I will be working at the VS booth. I also will be giving my interview for MSDN TV that was originally supposed to do today but ran out of time.