GetProjectItemTemplate

Getting the “Text Template” template:

var template = <EnvDTE80.Solution2>.GetProjectItemTemplate(“TextTemplate.CSharp.zip”, “CSharp”);

 

Visual Studio Folder Explorer

Sometimes I want to explore my folders from inside Visual Studio instead of Alt-Tab’ing to Windows Explorer; there are already excellent tools to do that on Visual Studio Gallery. But what they do is ephemeral; as soon as you close your session your folder structure is gone. What is more, they don’t let me annotate the folders that I am interested in or eliminate uninteresting ones from view without deleting them. On the other hand, I sometimes need to have different sets of the folders persisted so that I can concentrate on them later on. Furthermore, I also need to bring home the folder structure of some servers I have been using at work and persist some comments about them.

So, it is not just a question of exploring the file system from VS.

Therefore, I wrote a small DSL that lets me choose the folders that I am interested in, annotate them and persist the set that I want to peruse later. It is posted on the Visual Studio Gallery.

Actually, the real impetus for me was to migrate my old VS2008 C++ projects to VS10 so that I can uninstall VS2008; but I don’t remember their locations! So, I have to categorize the folders as C++ or other solutions, at the very least, and then as VS2008 and VS10. Even before categorizing, it is a good idea to give a description to all relevant folders; what were they for, will I be needing them, do they depend on anything else…

SVG to XAML Conversions

I have finished the initial usable versions of an “SVG to XAML Conversion Suite” on graphspe.com.

The reason why I needed to do it is that, although there are some other tools out there, they have some drawbacks:

1. Some of them render text as paths
2. Most don’t behave in a free-threaded environment so that I can’t use them immediately from my web sites, web services or parallel batch converters
3. Even if they render text correctly, it appears in the wrong places
4. Some can’t handle “100%” sizing (which becomes 0, so no visuals); in general, canvas sizes are not measured correctly
5. Most are not friendly to GraphViz’ svg output

While the suite is not perfect, I have control over which features I need so that I can implement/modify them.

Tree Drawing Language

I have just developed an embedded language to represent trees and draw them on a WPF canvas in XAML, and published it on the tree drawing language section of my domain specific languages page.

Its usage is extremely simple:

"ceo (cfo (accounting hr planning) cio (operations it))".ToCanvas() → Canvas
"ceo (cfo (accounting hr planning) cio (operations it))".ToXaml() → Xaml
"ceo (cfo (accounting hr planning) cio (operations it))".ToTree() → Tree

 

So, one can simply printf to a string and immediately obtain a tree along with its drawing.

SVG to XAML Conversions

I have finished the initial usable versions of an “SVG to XAML Conversion Suite” on sixpairs.com.

The reason why I needed to do it is that, although there are some other tools out there, they have some drawbacks:

1. Some of them render text as paths
2. Most don’t behave in a free-threaded environment so that I can’t use them immediately from my web sites, web services or parallel batch converters
3. Even if they render text correctly, it appears in the wrong places
4. Some can’t handle “100%” sizing (which becomes 0, so no visuals); in general, canvas sizes are not measured correctly
5. Most are not friendly to GraphViz’ svg output

While the suite is not perfect, I have control over which features I need so that I can implement/modify them.

SVG to XAML Converter

None of the converters that I tried could convert my GraphViz svg output to XAML, so I decided to write my own.

It is posted on graphspe.com.

XamlTune converted text to paths!…

…with the paths in wrong places on top of it! (no ”middle” align?)

The xslt solution (don’t remember the url) did not work at all.

Well I should say that non-programmatic solutions were not in my periscope.

So this is what I did: