VS 2015, VS Extensibility

Past, present and future challenges for developers of Visual Studio extensions

It has been a while since my last post. In this time I have spent four weeks of vacations (although working a lot on my MZ-Tools extension), I have got a new laptop (MacBook Pro 13″ Retina), a new year has come and I have been awarded Microsoft MVP again (my 12th award). Most of the time working on my extension has been in two painful tasks, which reminds me how challenging is to develop extensions for Visual Studio, specially when Microsoft releases new major versions. This is the history of difficulties that I recall since Visual Studio (.NET) was born:

  • In Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003 you had to learn a new extensibility model (EnvDTE), different from the one used by Visual Basic 6.0. Also, creating toolwindows was extremely tricky because you needed to create a shim ActiveX control in C++. A native satellite dll for custom bitmaps was required.
  • In Visual Studio 2005 you had additional automation assemblies (EnvDTE80), you had to convert all the icons from 16 colors to 256 colors and you could create COM-free add-ins (with the .AddIn file). A satellite dll for custom bitmaps was still required, but no longer native.
  • In Visual Studio 2008 there was no much change, apart from the tricky magical colors to get transparency in bitmaps of buttons and toolwindow icons.
  • Visual Studio 2010 was the most stressful version ever released. The introduction of WPF-based commandbars (instead of the previous Office-based commandbars) caused tons of bugs in add-ins that I reported to Microsoft. A satellite dll for custom bitmaps was no longer required. You could use WPF for your dialogs, but chances were that you kept using Windows Forms. In the packages area, new APIs and deployment mechanisms were introduced.
  • In Visual Studio 2012 macros were removed, a new icon style was introduced (which forced your extension to follow suit) and a new dark theme was introduced, which also forced you to theme your toolwindows and dialogs if you wanted to follow suit. Applying a dark theme to Windows Forms forms is hard.
  • In Visual Studio 2013 there was no much change.

At the present time, Visual Studio 2015 introduces these new challenges:

  • Add-ins are removed (the Add-In Manager is gone), which means that a migration to a package is required.
  • The code model (EnvDTE.Project.CodeModel and EnvDTE.ProjectItem.FileCodeModel) are reimplemented internally to use the .NET compiler platform (“Roslyn”). So, expect bugs, small bugs with possible workarounds and serious ones as to crash Visual Studio. I have reported several of them to Microsoft Connect in the last weeks (one of the two painful tasks that I mentioned). This will be the subject of my next post.

Also, I have mentioned that in the past weeks I have adquired a new laptop. I had a MacBook Air 11″ which has served me well in the last 2.5 years but it had its limits (128 GB SSD, 4 GB memory and 1280 pixels of resolution), and I wanted something more powerful. So, I got a MacBook Retina 13″ with 16 GB of memory and 256 GB SSD. The first thing that I noticed is that at native resolution and 100% DPI icons and texts are tiny, so you have to increase the DPI level to 150%. And at that level my MZ-Tools extension behaves badly. So I have spend a lot of time in the last weeks (the other painful task) making it fully DPI-aware, which means 1) correcting layouts, 2) scaling low resolution images to the correct size, and 3) providing high resolution images (for VS 2010 icon style and for VS 2012/2013/2015 icon style in light/dark themes). Applying high-DPI awareness to Windows Forms is tricky. This will be the subject of another post, but high-DPI awareness is another area that developers of Visual Studio extensions will need to learn and implement because retina displays will become mainstream for laptops this year, and 4K monitors for computers are also starting to appear. And you don’t want to contribute to the painful lifestyle of high-DPI desktops.

In the future at the very least I still think that the automation model (EnvDTE) used even by packages is at risk, despite Microsoft updating it in VS 2015 using Roslyn internally to provide more accurate results in the code model with the current API. The EnvDTE automation model was created in an era (Visual Studio .NET 2002) when add-ins and macros were the only form of Visual Studio extensibility (you couldn’t create packages until Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the VS SDK was not introduced until Visual Studio 2005). Ten years later, macros were removed in Visual Studio 2012 and add-ins will be removed in Visual Studio 2015. The VS SDK provides interfaces for most EnvDTE stuff, except the code model (that will be provided by Roslyn from now on) and another small areas (such as to create and edit solution configurations). I think that at some point Microsoft will consider another step in simplifying APIs removing EnvDTE. And getting rid of awful APIs and interfaces in the VS SDK when creating packages is long overdue, so expect new challenges.