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Announcement: New Tool to Auto-Generate Add-In Pipelines [Jesse Kaplan]

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This has been one of the most requested features we've had since people started learning more about our model and playing with the bits and I'm very happy to announce that we have published this on CodePlex: https://www.codeplex.com/clraddins/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Pipeline%20Builder

For a particular version of an application writing the code for the views and adapters can be a lot of mechanical repetitious work and generally only gets interesting when you are writing "cross-version" adapters. So what we've done is build a tool that will automatically generate the source code for the views and adapters for a given contract assembly. This tool is really just a library that can be used from various other places and our release includes a simple command line tool as well as a VS 2008 add-in that will automatically generate the projects and set references/build paths for you appropriately.

This tool should still be considered in pre-release state but because of the nature of it that shouldn't discourage you from using it in your products. While we are still working on adding additional features (and will be taking requests/suggestions for them), as long as tool has the features you need you should feel comfortable using it. Since the code this tool generates doesn't take any dependencies on the tool, or related assemblies, new updates will not impact your app and should be easy enough to incorporate in your build process. If we post updates that change the code generated for currently available features we'll make sure that gets noted and describe the changes.

One of the nice things about releasing this as shared source rather than as part of an official release is that we'll be able to do continuous development work on this and can release updates frequently, so please give it a spin and if you have feature requests/bug reports please send them our way.

 

In addition to the PipelineBuilder tool we will be using our team CodePlex site (https://www.codeplex.com/clraddins) to release all samples from now on. Many of you have noticed that because of changes to our API between betas and CTPs of 3.5 some of our existing samples no longer compile. We've posted updated versions of all of these samples on CodePlex and have added links to the them from the original posts.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 11, 2008
    I really like the idea of having it on CodePlex to make it easier for you to do updates. Putting the latest samples on CodePlex was a nice move as well.
  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2008
    How to use it?When I install it on a computer running Vista  and  VS2008 chs Team version,I can't see anything in tool menu item about it.So from where I can use it?
  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2008
    I have seen examples that use either abstract classes or interfaces in the host and add in views. My question is, is it possible to use an interface on the host view and an abstract class on the add in view? I would like to implement common functionality for the add ins, but don't want to carry that logic into the host. Is this possible?