Mike Feingold's Adventures in programming

First let me tell you that as much as I liked VS2010 Beta 1 I like the VS2010 Beta 2 much better. I will leave it to other guys to write about the new UI, new features, much improved speed etc., so that in my post I can focus on what is closer to me, VS Integration.

What I want to share with you here is a journal of what I did to port my Django editor from Beta 1 to Beta 2 - I just got it running on Beta2. Let me start with telling you that I did not run into any major issues. Here is a list of what changes in the API affected Django editor and what I did to address the issues:

• Interface Microsoft.VisualStudio.ApplicationModel.Environments.IEnvironment is gone. As a matter of fact the entire Microsoft.VisualStudio.ApplicationModel namespace is no longer. This interface was used in a number of methods. In Beta 2 all these methods (at least the ones I used) are one parameter short. So the fix was easy - I just changed the signatures.
• Microsoft.VisualStudio.Language.Intellisense.Completion constructor signature has changed. I need the insert value to be different from the display value, and the only constructor which gives a way to do that now also wants some information about icons. This is nothing too - gave it a null and an empty string to keep it happy
• The Microsoft.VisualStudio.Text.ContentType.TypeName which used to be "text" now is "plaintext". This is a little more subtle - primarily because the compiler does not catch it, just need to be thorough to change it everywhere. Also I relied on context to skip certain buffers, in particular the buffers created to hold the tooltip text. I had to find a different way to do that.
• The Microsoft.VisualStudio.Language.Intellisense.IQuickInfoSource.GetToolTipContent now returns ReadOnlyCollection<object> rather than an object - fine, I do not care about returning multiple, just wrapped my string into a collection and returned it
• A few changes in the F# - namely due to rename rethrow() to reraise() and deprecation of the OverloadID attribute.
• And finally the biggest change. Both Code Completion and Quick Info used to relay on broker map services, respectively ICompletionBrokerMapService andIQuickInfoBrokerMapService. These services maintained maps of brokers to textViews. No longer. Now Visual Studio maintains a single instance of ICompletionBroker as well as IQuickInfoBroker both to be accessed by directly importing them when necessary. An extra positive from this change was that simplifying the code by throwing away the code related to mapping services showed me the path to streamline the way I work with projection buffers in HTML editor and XML editor.

And this is pretty much it. Of course I had to mess around with project settings, missing F# dlls, changed format for vsix manifest etc., but this is to be expected. Anyway now I have a version of the Django editor for Beta 2.В  Right now I have it in the subversion. I will release it in binaries shortly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 4:57 pm and is filed under django, vseditor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.