Craig Bailey on Microsoft

I’ve always liked how the Team System team work hard to provide details on what they’re up to. This is becoming more the norm on Microsoft assets (just check out the great job Beth Massi has been doing on the VSTO site for example), and so I shouldn’t be surprised to see just how serious they see simple things like content management to be. as Jeff Beehler notes, the Team System team have hired a dedicated web site manager for the Team System site. Sharon Elkins is the lucky person, and she blogs here about what her plans for the site are. Here’s the Team System community site, featuring everyone’s favorite defacto Aussie: Chuck Sterling.

Why would I write a post about this? Simply because I feel that the best way Microsoft can widely reach developers is by providing consistently high quality, easily discoverable, up-to-date content. Forget all those events and outreach extravaganzas – the best way to engage with developers is from a Google search result. More on my thinking on this in a future post.

One of the biggest hurdles with VSTO is deployment.

As you probably know, the pre-requisites for running a VSTO app (even of the simplest Hello World variety) include:

• .NET Framework 3.5
• Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs)
• VSTO Runtime
• (Plus Office of course)

Now, packaging these isn’t the issue, since the Visual Studio team have worked hard to make the ClickOnce process a simple and seamless experience. The issue is the size of the download, plus requiring Admin privileges on the box you are installing on. For developers like you and me this doesn’t sound like much of a problem, but for an IT Manager in charge of rolling a simple VSTO app out across an enterprise this can be a significant headache (although Group policy can solve some of this).

And it doesn’t stop there, because if you have a number of VSTO add-ins going out, each of them needs to be installed separately. Finally there’s limitations with how to control post-install events (Eg copying Word or Excel templates into the proper locations).

The VSTO team have been focusing on deployment and security issues over the last 2 releases, and in the VS2008 release they made significant improvements. The recent SP1 for .NET 3.5 further eased the process.

But, it’s a process that still needs improvement.

Visual Studio 2010

So, it’s good to see that the team are making excellent progress in VS2010. As the recent PDC presentation from Saurabh Bhatia demonstrated (PowerPoint file here), there’s already key functionality increases.

[UPDATE: Removed the embedded presentation as it was preloading and sucking bandwidth – click here to view]

The main points covered are:

• Multi-project deployment (eg install an Outlook add-in, Excel add-in and Word add-in all at once)
• Post deployment custom actions (eg moving files to user directories, deleting files during uninstall)
• No-PIA installs (no need to include the PIAs – achieved via Type Embedding – a feature in CLR 4.0

This is welcome news to VSTO developers (actually probably more so for IT Managers). The pre-requisites are now down to the .NET Framework and the VSTO Runtime, and complex VSTO applications can be installed with a single install and enabled to configure itself.

It’d be so much simpler if the VSTO Runtime was automatically installed with Office or the Framework, but as we know, Microsoft are trying to reduce install sizes these days not add to them. Deployment will always have its pain points – good to see the team are getting close to an acceptable compromise.

Maarten van Stam has a nice tip for isolating specific changes made in SP1. Check out his post here, or just run this search and you’ll see the list of 902 pages worth of doco changes.

You can then narrow that further by selecting one of the one of the Refinement options:

Refining by Visual Studio Tools for Office and Visual Studio 2008 for example gives us 306 results:

Speaking of VSTO related stuff specifically, Christin Boyd has a rundown of the VSTO SP1 enhancements here.

Thanks to Deepak Kapoor for alerting me to this one – the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery – a list of add-ins and extensions for Visual Studio. It’s been around for a little while now, so you may already know about it. But if not, start here with the list of Highest Rated add-ins for Visual Studio.

A nice little interview with Milind Lele by Beth Massi, uncovering some of the nice data sync enhancements coming in SP1 (especially if you are connecting to SQL Server 2008). If you haven’t seen this stuff covered before, then this 15 minute overview is worth watching.

But treat this as a ‘what’s possible’ not a ‘how to do it’ video. It covers the functionality nicely, but I’m a little concerned when I see Microsoft endorsed videos having demos that involve putting fundamental code in the click events of toolbar buttons. Developers with a few years of experience under their belts know this is just example code for the sake of brevity, but sadly we’re seeing more and more code these days from newbie developers that feature all these bad practices (click event code, pasted in javascript, code copied and pasted repeatedly instead of in classes, the list goes on). This video would have been a stand out if Milind had taken a few extra minutes to demonstrate how the code could have been better organised.

I’m really looking forward to SP1 though.

I’ve been meaning to blog link this for ages, because I use it all the time but always have to go searching for the URL…

So here it is, Corneliu’s most excellently helpful Anti-spam email encoding tool. Put in your email address and it’ll return a nice encoded one that most spam bots won’t recognise (sure the smarter they become the less effective this will be, but you’ve still got a while until that happens).

Corneliu is also the author of Hawkeye (which was made open source earlier this year) as well as a few other VS add-ins.

But while we’re here, have you seen his new .NET deadlock detector?