March 2009 – Page 2 – justinmchase

MIX09 Announcements

There are lots of cool videos of demos and discussions over at Mix09 today. If you haven’t been there you should definitely head on over.

http://live.visitmix.com/

There are lots of cool announcements for new features for the next version of various Microsoft products. Too many for me to even enumerate in a single blog post actually but what’s really exciting is that I finally get to tell everyone what I have been working on these last couple on the job at Microsoft.

I have been working with a small team of developers, here in Minneapolis, who are responsible for the Photoshop Import feature of expression studio. It’s been a very interesting an exciting project so far and it seems like something that developers and designers are both very happy about. Here is a screen shot from the Mix demo site.

We’re able to read the layer information from a Photoshop file and import them as separate controls into Blend. Once there a developer can make those generated layers into real interactive controls like anything else in Blend. There is also a re-import feature to ease to workflow from designer to developer. This exact incarnation of the importer is available in the build of Blend 3 Preview, so download that and give it a shot! Feel free to send me feedback if you do try it out.

Expression Studio and MIX09

Tomorrow is Day 1 of MIX09, if you’re not aware of this then you ~~must be living on mars~~ should amble on over and check out what’s in store this year. There’s a lot I can’t tell you but I can say there are tons of cool new features being announced for the first time tomorrow, including the one that I have been working on here in Minneapolis. Also, there are some features that will be demoed during the keynote that will not be apart of the public CTP released at the same time so you should definitely check that out to get a complete idea of the sweetness of the real release.

If you have any questions about features feel free to ask me sometime tomorrow after the keynote 😉 Until then it’s all hush hush.

MetaSharp on CodePlex

I finally managed to get the source code for the little side project I’ve been working on into CodePlex.

http://metasharp.codeplex.com

Give it a shot and let me know how it works out for you! There are definitely known limitations at this point, there is almost certainly language syntax that doesn’t work right for starters. Most of the basic stuff is there but l haven’t really tested abstract members much or events and things like that. I also haven’t implemented “macros” yet, which isn’t very hard to do in the parser but is much harder to do in the compiler. I’ll probably hook that up for v0.2.

I’m also in dire need of cleaning up some regular project maintenance stuff such as versions for the assemblies, automated build, many more unit tests, code analysis, etc.

If you’re still scratching your head about what I’m even trying to do here check out these two wiki pages

Basic Workflow

http://metasharp.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Workflow

Song Sample

http://metasharp.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Song%20Sample

If you’re still scratching your head please let me know, because I’m either not explaining it right or this is more confusing than I thought.

By the way, this project is not an official Microsoft project in any way. This is something I have done in the evenings and weekends for my own enjoyment. Please don’t ask anyone else for support and don’t blame them if you think this project is lame 🙂

Uninstalling Visual Studio 2008 on Windows 7 Beta

It turns out I accidentally installed the Trial version of VS 2008 off of MSDN. So that makes me a bonehead but as a dose of extra punishment it turns out there is a bug in the VS 2008 uninstaller on windows 7. So that is a real bummer. I’ve been struggling to uninstall it for a couple days now and I finally figured it out.

First I’ll start by saying I uninstalled everything related to VS. My Live writer plug-ins, my XNA stuff and Oslo stuff and I was still failing to uninstall. The trick is to go to the uninstall screen in the control panel and select “view installed updates”. There is an update for VS 2008 with almost the same title as the application itself, uninstall that then go back to the main uninstall screen and try again. This time it should work!

What an ordeal!

Groovy Meta Programming at the TCLangUG

Head over to the Twin Cities Languages User Groupmeeting tomorrow night for a meta programming event. Here is a description of the event:

GROOVY METAPROGRAMMING (MARCH 12TH, 2009)

Ruby’s monkeypatching brought the idea of metaprogramming to the masses, or at least to those that weren’t exposed to it in Lisp or C. At its best, metaprogramming can greatly improve productivity, as is the case with Grails, but at its worst it can destroy expectations and induce versioning confusion. This talk introduces the myriad metaprogramming techniques Groovy and dynamic typing allows, shows how some of them are used in real life, and compares them to what’s available in other languages. Oh yeah, all code will be written live.