The growing pains of NGEDIT

Since the CTP release in November’08, I had been meaning to have a deep look at Visual Studio 2010. I had had a superficial look, just enough to know that the editor is completely re-done, and that I’d have a lot of work for the new versions. A few weeks ago, Beta 1 was released, and I really had to start looking at it. I do need to have working versions on both early.

I started seriously looking at it last week. It’s been a bumpy ride:

– Seeing that the Spy++ tool hardly shows any HWND at all in the new IDE… it’s all a big messy HWND window! (what?)
– Realizing that the new editor, that uses WPF, is purely managed, so my old COM-based native-C++ approach is invalid (ugh!)
– Coming to terms with the fact that I need to do .NET coding, something I had managed to avoid until now (ahem…)
– Finding out that the new APIs to draw on the text editor window are much more powerful and will allow many nicer things (yay!)
– Getting all-very-excited about the totally cool things I can do for ViEmu, and mainly, for Codekana (wow!)
– Discovering that all the improvements in the display system are *not* accompanied by improvements in the input system, the new KeyProcessor doesn’t allow me to access needed keypresses… (bwah)
– Realizing that the old keypress interception methods are not valid, because of the WPF thing (argh!!)
– Realizing that many of the ugly compatibility issues with other 3rd party tools are coming back, in new and ugly forms (ugh…)

All in all, it will be a tough job, some things are not very nice in the new VS2010, but I think I will be able to provide very cool things in the new versions.

Sean Laberee and Noah Richards from the VS dev team are being helpful with the issues, and it will be great to have some of their help during the tough project.

I will be lurking in the new VSX forum (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsxprerelease/threads), given there is little documentation, and that even with complete documentation, it’s never enough.

BTW, I find twitter more and more useful every day (http://twitter.com/jonbho).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 11:09 pm and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.