Long Time

It has been a long time since my last post here. It has been a long time since posting anywhere. The demands of time and pure exhaustion sometimes does take its toll. Everybody pays up eventually.

Recently I have been working on a project to update Karl Shifflett’s XAML Power Toys for use in Visual Studio 2012. Shifflett’s last update to the tools was in 2010 and only makes it available for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. When I migrated to VS 2012 I lost Karl’s tools, and wanted to get them back.

I thought it would be a good study to translated the Visual Basic code in Karl’s solution to C#, both to get an understanding of the architecture of the program, but also to learn something about writing extensions for Visual Studio. It has been a good and enlightening experience. I have forgotten a lot of Basic since moving to C#. Going through this exercise brought a lot of it back to me. (But not quite enough for me to switch back from C# though.)

Assuming no objection from Mr. Shifflett I hope to finish this project in a few days, and make it available on the Visual Studio Gallery where it will be easy to download and install within VS. I’ll try to make the converted source code available somewhere too.

Hopefully once that’s done I will also have a little time to describe the project in more detail, and show how the program has been coded so that it does what it can do.

If you write Silverlight or WPF code, and have to deal with XAML in those programs, come back to this blog from time to time. You will want to download my update of Shifflett’s code, if you use Visual Studio 2012, and you might help me tweak it so it’s just a little bit better than it already is.

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