Following Hammett's blog post earlier today announcing that all the projects that form the Castle Project will be lead and released individually, instead of one big package.
Castle committers were asked to offer to become projects leads. Hammett states that project leads "should oversee the project in near and long terms, keep the documentation, take care of patches, set goals and roadmaps, seek collaboration and release the bits."
Not being a Castle committer I offered to lead the Castle tools; which are DynamicProxy2, NVelocity and Visual Studio Integration (new project wizards). Hammett has taken me up on my offer, and for now I will be leading these 3 projects.
The first task I will be doing is going through the logged issues and trying to plan a roadmap for the projects and discuss these with everyone.
After working out a roadmap, getting some initial documentation written for these tools will probably be my next priority since the tools currently have no official documentation. I will also be looking at the current Visual Studio integration to determine if Castle Visual Studio Integration from the contrib should be merged, and getting it all updated for Visual Studio 2008.
I'm not sure how well I can lead these projects, time will only tell. If you have any comments on what I am doing or not doing, I am open to your comments or criticism. I'm hoping with help from the community we can get these projects released very soon as DynamicProxy2 and NVelocity have been stable for some time now.
Please post any comments about the projects themselves on the castle users or development mailing lists.
I have just released Castle Visual Studio Integration 0.3.2. This release fixes several serious Visual Studio lockup issues. Full details of the changes are available in the changes file in subversion.
Download Castle Visual Studio Integration 0.3.2
The MSI installer for Castle Visual Studio Integration runs both VS2005 and VS2008 with the /setup switch to configure the new Visual Studio package. Because this process can take a while, I tried to work out how to display custom status text while the custom action was running, but had no luck in finding any documentation about how to do this until just recently.
If you have a custom action like:
<CustomAction Id="CA_DevEnv2008Setup" Property="DEVENV2008_EXE_PATH" ExeCommand="/setup" Impersonate="no" Execute="deferred" />
Then a ProgressText element like the following will set the status text while it is running:
<UI>
<ProgressText Action="CA_DevEnv2008Setup">Configuring Visual Studio 2008... (this may take a few minutes</ProgressText>
</UI>
I found the details of how to do this in a forum post on the WiX sourceforge mailing list.
Announcing Castle Visual Studio Integration 0.3 with Visual Studio 2008 support.
Also arriving in the 0.3 release is:
- a new MSI/WiX installer that will install Castle Visual Studio Integration for both VS2005 and VS2008;
- basic XHTML IntelliSense; and
- a few minor IntelliSense bug fixes.
Download Castle Visual Studio Integration 0.3
Recently, I spent some time getting Castle Visual Studio Integration working on Visual Studio 2008.
James Curran got it working a while back (as mentioned in CONTRIB-57 of the Castle Project's issue tracker), however this was using the VS2005 compatibility mode. I decided that it would be a better idea to move to the 2008 binaries and conditional compile CVSI, so that I could continue to support both Visual Studio releases without problems. JetBrains does this with ReSharper so I thought it must be a better solution.
After getting it mostly working I decided to consult Google, where these 2 blog posts by James Lau helped get everything work right:
Upgrading VS 2005 Packages to VS 2008: A Basic Guide
Upgrading VS 2005 Packages to VS 2008: A more Advanced Guide
If you are working on Visual Studio packages, James' blog contains heaps of useful information. Thanks James.