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[ANN] VSLab is available
f#

It is with great pleasure that I announce the first release of VSLab, an extension to Visual Studio based on F# and F# interactive that allows using VS as Matlab programming toolwindows and interactively analyze data. The project is available under MS-PL license and has been published on CodePlex:

[link:www.codeplex.com]

I hope you'll enjoy the tool and perhaps use it and contribute to its development.

The project has been supported by Microsoft and it is a sample showing a non-trivial extension to Visual Studio. I thought VSLab would be great!

I wish to thank all the people that have contributed to this project: Davide Morelli and Sara Berardelli in the first place that have made possible the core mechanisms and the 3D viewlet respectively. Cristina Nardini and Emanuele Arpini from Microsoft that supported the idea, and Don Syme that provide such a beautiful piece of code and supported me during VSLab development. I also thanks all other people that are not mentioned here but that have contributed in many ways.

Antonio Cisternino

.

Bravo Antonio!

This is a great effort and makes good on your vision of an integrated laboratory environment. I look forward to using this environment and perhaps contributing to its development.

I'd like to see WPF support for the viewlets, and will investigate how this could be done.

warmest regards,
Danny

By on 6/26/2008 5:15 AM ()

Every contribution to make VSLab a success is welcome. If you are interested in extending it have a look at a document that I wrote about the implementation (in VSLabHelp\doc of source code distribution) to understand the intricacies of having viewlets.

I would love to have WPF support but at the moment the only idea I have would be to have a XAML interpreter embedded within a toolwindow (perhaps Silverlight...).

Ciao

-- Antonio

By on 6/26/2008 10:39 AM ()

VSLab codename Hal has been released. It is a consolidation release but it fixed serious issues. Here is what's new:

</li><li>Support for multiple instances of Visual Studio and VSLab </li><li>Optional overriding of fsc.exe </li><li>New VS PerfMon viewlet </li><li>Fixed bug on Viewlet closing </LI> -- Antonio

By on 6/29/2008 3:57 AM ()

Thanks for this great release, but I have some minor suggestions.

Is it possible to let VSLab save it's settings like toolbar and viewlets locations.

By on 6/29/2008 4:53 AM ()

Improving the integration with VS is in the Roadmap but you can already use static methods of Viewlets class to save and restore viewlets. It is some time that we do not test it but it should work. At the moment you simply save and restore viewlets, not their state. We will work on the toolbar :)

-- Ciao,

-- Antonio

By on 6/29/2008 7:18 AM ()

Improving the integration with VS is in the Roadmap but you can already use static methods of Viewlets class to save and restore viewlets. It is some time that we do not test it but it should work. At the moment you simply save and restore viewlets, not their state. We will work on the toolbar :)

-- Ciao,

-- Antonio

Thanks, but I meant the VS docking locations of the viewlets.

By on 6/29/2008 7:47 AM ()

Yes this is what I mean. You simply do:

Viewlets.Save(@"c:\somewhere\position.xml")

and

Viewlets.Load(@"c:\somewhere\position.xml")

Note that at the moment you have to ensure that Viewlet classes are available through reflection, thus when you do load you must ensure to #refer assembly and define on-the-fly viewlets before load.

By on 6/29/2008 9:10 AM ()

Hi,

I attempted to host a Wpf control in a Viewlet using the article here [link:msdn.microsoft.com], however was unsuccessful. This is probably an error in my understanding of how Viewlets work.

I've started a discussion on Codeplex here [link:www.codeplex.com]. If anyone has an idea of why this is not possible or if it could be supported I'd be grateful.

warm regards,
Danny

By on 7/1/2008 12:17 PM ()

More on Viewlets and WPF (including my first answer) are on CodePlex, everyone interested is welcome. Quick answer: Viewlets architecture is inherently bound with Win32 and GDI, I think it is possible to have a new WPFViewlet that marshals WPF calls into an appropriate VS toolwindow.

-- Ciao,

-- Antonio

By on 7/2/2008 2:15 AM ()

I just released a new version of VSLab, this is a major release and includes the notion of package. We have also redesigned namespaces of Viewlets. It is a relevant release. Updated documentation will be released ASAP.

By on 7/15/2008 11:00 AM ()

I just relased VSLab compatible with September 2008 CTP, it is a main release not because of features but because I had to change many things in the integration. However this is really less hacky and I don't even need to override fsc.exe anymore (yuppiiii!).

Enjoy!

By on 9/7/2008 3:54 PM ()

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