Patrick Cooney's Weblog

Licensed to IL, iTunes review, from the bizarre theatre department...

2004-07-11

Various PLASers have indicated to me that integrating GPCP into vs.net was difficult, so I have approached the IDE with a great deal of trepidation. This morning I took the plunge and flipped through Johnson, Skibo and Young's Inside Microsoft Visual Studio.Net before attempting to build a simple addin for vs.net. And now I see where those PLASers were coming from.

It isn’t that integration is impossible, it is just that the APIs and programming model are unlike the .Net world I know and am used to dealing with. For example, integrating commands into the IDE involves implementing a dispatch interface (IDTCommandTarget), which handles any commands owned by a particular vs addin.

I found debugging said dispatch method a challenge, since my command kept disappearing from the tools menu. And reappearing after I removed the addin. After some experimentation I found that tinkering with the registry before each debug session fixed this.

Despite the weirdness, I managed to get a fun little addin working: I now have a tools command that will disassemble all project outputs in a solution, and send the IL to the output window:

I used iTunes for the first time on Saturday, snapping up "Long Train Runnin’" by The Doobie Brothers for a measly 79p. I don’t know much about the Doobies, but this is an awesome track. The purchase was smooth, but I nearly lost _it_ when I couldn’t copy my purchased track to my iPod. iTunes didn’t tell me why, didn’t give me any advice, it just didn’t do it. And that never happens with Limewire.

From the offbeat Broadway productions department, Gates et. al. now have their own musical (NY Times, subscription required).

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