Ken,

Oops, it sounds like you just revealed way too much about future development... I guess you'll have to shoot us all now. :-)

Sounds like some pretty cool stuff. I really enjoyed the peek at the XML editor thingie recently on my visit there. I think it will quickly become a favorite tool. (BTW, Joe Andreshak, PM on the Office team, was quite intrigued when I told him how your utility handled the WordXML).

Oops, did I say too much now? (ducking)

Dave

>>Finally I was just impressed with the fact that an outside vendor was able to add such a cool 'value added' tool on top of VS.Net.
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>Interesting detailed explanation, thanks. I see you were most interested in it as a learning tool rather than a long term productivity too, possibly. I agree it is cool that there is the ability for these types of add-on products to exist nicely integrated in the Visual Studio shell. Microsoft recently announced that the VSIP SDK is free, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/partners/. Before it was an expense fee to be involved. This new free SDK is going to open the door significantly for 3rd party Visual Studio add-ons, so you should expect to see many more products and utilities like this over the next year become available.
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>I am working part time on some of the design features of the upcoming version of VFP code named Europa, in particular, the extensibility hooks using XML for the Property Sheet to have custom tools and events defined for base and custom properties, including control over a new Favorites tab at a class level as well as a global setting level. The enhanced report writer in Europa is evolving very well also, new features to be announced at the VFP Frankfurt conference in early November. For those of you who use VFP 8.0, we are looking to finish SP1 for VFP 8.0 next week and we expect to have it on the MSDN web site within 2 weeks from now. Some other new stuff will be posted and announced for VFP soon as well.
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>As well as the VFP extensibility project, last week I was added to a team of three people at Microsoft working on the scenarios and technical strategy document for the extensibility features of Orcas (the version of Visual Studio after Whidbey). For more information about Orcas, refer to the recently updated VS roadmap doc at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/roadmap.aspx. The key goals are to support even better extensibility hooks into the Visual Studio shell as well as tighter integration and functionality for community related features right in the product, some of which can be found in VFP today and some of which is new invention.
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>I'm also driving the XML tools being added to Whidbey, and there is a new rich XML editor with XSLT editing/debugging being added. Today I saw for the first time working the new outline expand/collapse functionality working in the XML editor (like you see with other languages while in source view). I should also mention that I'm working with the VS team at Microsoft working on the enhanced debugger for Whidbey and I'm working on helping figure out how to best create tools that allow you to view various datatypes while debugging. This work is actually being done by the C# team, while part of the VB team is working on some of the new data features for Whidbey. Today I submitted a technical solution that may end up being adopted to do more than they originally expected for the debugger features, for things such as XML types and other. OK, well it's not quite midnight yet here, so I have some more work to finish up for today, all for now. :)