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Microsoft/VSX Trip

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Microsoft/VSX Trip

Postby Charles » Sat Sep 13, 2008 7:57 pm

Microsoft is having a two day conference on Visual Studio Extensions (VSX) on Mon and Tue. I'm attending, although it's still not clear when/if I'll have time to do a Visual Studio plug-in for Cobra. We'll see.

Anyway I'll be on the road those two days.

-Chuck
Charles
 
Posts: 2515
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Re: Microsoft/VSX Trip

Postby Csaba » Tue Sep 16, 2008 3:51 am

Hi Chuck.

I hope it will be a rewarding conference and that you somehow will find it possible to do a VS plugin.
VS support is mandatory for Cobra to become a true success.

Regards
Csaba
Csaba
 
Posts: 42

Re: Microsoft/VSX Trip

Postby Charles » Mon Sep 22, 2008 3:26 am

Unfortunately, it doesn't look good short term. When I attempted a Visual Studio language package earlier this year, I found the process difficult, arcane and undocumented. I was hoping to discover today that I was missing something or that a substantial improvement had been made. I did not:

After the keynote on the first day, a member of the audience spoke up to complain that there was no explicit documentation on what was required to support an alternate language in Visual Studio.

I talked to that person afterwards. He has been working with Visual Studio for language support for about 4 years. His additional comments included:

-- Over time, the Visual Studio APIs have improved, but they're just not "there" yet in terms of documentation and ease of use.

-- Some parts of Visual Studio are still hard coded to support only C# or VB.

On the brighter side, Microsoft folks from the Visual Studio team were not in denial when he complained. They want to make further improvements to the APIs and docs.

I talked to another developer who did a language plugin for VS. He said his effort was around 1+ man months.

Combined with time constraints, the above negatives are too much for me to overcome right now. So short term, I think our best bet is to enhance SharpDevelop (#develop) which would give us autocompletion and debugging. Afterwards, we can either pursue VS 2008 or wait for the next version of VS to grow real docs and improve APIs.

Another required avenue for Cobra's popularity will be running on JVM so that developers can have their choice of VM and even switch between them as needed. In that vein, I'll be attending the JVM Language Summit this week.
Charles
 
Posts: 2515
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Re: Microsoft/VSX Trip

Postby relez » Mon Sep 22, 2008 1:16 pm

Hi Chuck. I think that a VS plugin could be a very nice shot for Cobra but it's not the only one. Speaking about Cobra with co-workers i understood that first all developers need a 1.0 stable version. Support from some editors (Ultraedit, Notepadd++, Scite and so on) could be nice. And, in fact, support in sharpdevelop could be an important step forward. Another goal, i believe, is Cobra as Web Language for aspx pages, so like, C# and VBNet but also IronPython and Oxygene (and Delphi)... this may be a bit easier target.There is much interest in Web-distributed applications.
Many languages have become popular without a VS support... look at Ruby, Python, also D language... i think cause they're good languages with interesting aspects (closures, generics, functional oriented features) growing in popularity.
relez
 
Posts: 69

Re: Microsoft/VSX Trip

Postby Charles » Mon Sep 22, 2008 2:10 pm

Thanks for your post. I agree that a stable 1.0 is necessary and I'm directly committed towards that effort. Consequently, I have less time for other efforts which would include:

-- VS plugin

-- #develop plugin

-- ASP.NET integration

-- JVM port

So... if anyone would like to help out, please feel free to pitch in!

Also, editor support should accumulate at the EditorSupport wiki page. I'll see if I can add UltraEdit this week.
Charles
 
Posts: 2515
Location: Los Angeles, CA


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