VS Blog Reader Sample, IL Projects, and a New Book

It has taken me a while, but I finally uploaded the VSBlogger Add-in to a GotDotNet workspace. You can find it under the name VSBlogger. There are a couple known bugs, mainly that it saves its data files to the “C:\msblogger.dat” root directory rather than you’re profile data area. Second, it does not work against all blog servers, I tested it against a few servers other than the one we use at blogs.msdn.com, but I am not sure it will work on all of them. The sources are provided, and you are welcome to try it out, make fixes, add features, etc. Just remember that what is there started out as a demo, so not everything will work perfectly right now and it does not have all the features that other blog editors may have.

 

[Edit: 6/14, 3:57PM] Here is a direct link to the workspace: https://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/vsblogger

 

 

I spent my free time over the past week converting my package for managing IL projects in VS from C++ to C#. It was not as easy converting this code base to C# as it was converting the IL text editor to C# from C++. The project has much more code in it than the language service has, so the amount of code to convert slowed me down. I also made a number of substantial changes to how the code worked that took a lot of time. For instance, I would keep the list of items in a project in a linked list in the C++ version. While you can create a linked list in C#, using generics would be much cleaner so I had to convert everything. The only real problem I have left is getting my property pages to appear, but I cannot get VS to look for my ISpecifyPropertyPages code. That will be my work item tonight.

 

 

While I am on the topic, Marc, Brian and I met today to discuss the second edition of our book. While we have not received final approval yet, it has more or less received the thumbs-up. So I guess this is the first public notice that we are working on the next version. We think this one will have more for different people, we plan on adding chapters for the Team System, as well as three chapters about VSIP (getting started, creating language services, and creating projects), as well as rewrites of some of the old chapters to refresh them and bring them up-to-date with VS 2005. There is no ETA yet on when it will be published, that is still being worked out. Also, the list of new chapters may change, but we think these will be added. Let us know if you have anything you would like to see, maybe there was something that we missed the last time, or maybe we went spent too many pages talking about something that could have been devoted to some other topic.