If you haven’t heard I’m working on a project with Mads Kristensen called SideWaffle. SideWaffle is a Visual Studio Extension which contains many different Visual Studio Item and Project Templates. This is a community effort and all open source at https://github.com/ligershark/template-builder. You can create your own Item Templates and Project Templates and send a Pull Request for them to be included in the main repo. Check out the video below for more info on SideWaffle.
SideWaffle intro video
Item Templates are used by VS developers to create files using the Add New Item dialog. SideWaffle already contains a number of Item Templates such as; Angular Controller, robots.txt, SignalR Hub and Client, etc. For more info on how to create Item Templates with SideWaffle watch the 4 minute video below.
Project Templates are the items that show up in the Add New Project dialog. They provide a starting point for developers creating new projects. SideWaffle already has a few project templates as well, such as a Google Chrome Extension. You can learn more about how to create Project Templates in this video.
Now that we’ve gotten the intro out of the way, let’s explore how you can create your own SideWaffle.
How to create your own SideWaffle
The idea behind SideWaffle is that we will have a shared VS extension for popular VS Item and Project Templates. Instead of contributing to the main SideWaffle project you may be interested in creating your own distribution that does not have the standard templates. For example, I’ve heard from both the Orchard and Umbraco that they are interested in creating template packs for their communities. It wouldn’t make much sense to include those templates in the main SideWaffle project. Instead it would be best to create a separate distribution for each; OrchardWaffle and UmbracoWaffle.
So how can you do this? It’s pretty easy actually. SideWaffle is built on top of a NuGet package, TemplateBuilder, which is also open source at https://github.com/ligershark/template-builder. All the core functionality of SideWaffle is contained in that NuGet package. To create your own SideWaffle follow these steps:
- If you don’t have it already download and install the Visual Studio SDK, here is 2012 version
- Create a new Visual Studio Package project
- From the package manager console execute Install-Package TemplateBuilder –pre
After you add the TemplateBuilder NuGet package a few things happen:
- The build process of the project is modified to support building Item and Project templates
- Your .vsixmanifest file is updated with two new Asset tags
- An ItemTemplates folder is created with a sample Item Template
From here on you can build the project and after installing the generated .vsix you can have users easily create instances of your item or project templates.
You can add additional Item Templates, as well as create Project Templates in your project. That’s pretty much all there is to getting started with your own Waffle pack.
Let me know if you have any issues or comments.
Happy Waffleing!
Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi | http://msbuildbook.com | @SayedIHashimi
A few weeks ago I blogged about a Visual Studio extension, Farticus, which I’m working on with Mads Kristensen. In that post I described how the default compression of a .vsix (the artifact that is created for a Visual Studio Package) is not as small as it could be. It’s better to get a fully compressed VSIX because when users install the component the download time can be significantly reduced. In that post I described how you could use the Zip task from the MSBuild Extension Pack to have a fully compressed .vsix file. I will now show you how I’ve simplified this.
VsixCompress
Since my previous post I’ve created a NuGet package, VsixCompress which simplifies this greatly. If you have an existing Visual Studio package and want to have a fully compressed .vsix file then all you need to do is install the VsixCompress package.
After you install this package the following happens.
- NuGet package is downloaded and installed to the packages folder
- The project is edited to include an import for a new .targets file
- The build process is extended to compress the .vsix file automatically
After installing this package once you build the generated .vsix is much smaller than before. In the default case where you select to create a new C# VS Package the created .vsix is 17kb. After adding VsixCompress the resulting .vsix is only 9kb. That’s almost half the size. That’s all you need to know for local development. If you have a build server setup then there are a couple of additional steps. Let’s go over those now.
Build Server Support
I have blogged before about issues of shipping build updates in NuGet. To briefly summarize, when leveraging NuGet Package Restore you have to be careful if any of those NuGet packages have build updates. When using Package Restore the NuGet packages which contain the imported .targets file(s) are restored after the build starts. What this means is that the .targets files will never be imported (or an old copy is imported in the case the file exists from a previous build). The only way to work around this is to restore the packages before the .sln/.csproj file themselves are built. You can read the full details at http://sedodream.com/2012/12/24/SlowCheetahBuildServerSupportUpdated.aspx. I have a NuGet package, PackageRestore, which can help here. Take a look at my previous post How to simplify shipping build updates in a NuGet package. Now that we’ve discussed all the details that you need let’s discuss what my plans are going forward with this.
Plans going forward
I’m hoping to add the following features over the course of the next few weeks.
FYI VsixCompress is open source so you can take a look at the code, or better yet contribute at https://github.com/sayedihashimi/vsix-compress.
Please let me know what you think of this!
Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi | http://msbuildbook.com | @SayedIHashimi
Lately I’ve been working with Mads Kristensen on a cool new Visual Studio Extension, Farticus, and wanted to share with you guys one of the things that I learned.
When you are developing Visual Studio extension on of the things you should keep in mind is the download size of the extension. This is the size of the .vsix file which you upload to the gallery. If the download size is too large typically people may get impatient and cancel the install. Because of this it’s a good idea to try and get your .vsix to the smallest size possible.
The good news here is that the .vsix file is already compressed. It’s actually a .zip file renamed to .vsix. If you want to see what’s in a .vsix just rename it to .zip and extract it out. The bad news is that the CreateZipPackage task used by the Microsoft.VsSdk.targets file does not perform the best compression. Fortunately there are tasks to create Zip files that we can use. I have chosen to use the Zip task from the MSBuild Extension Pack.
Before I go over all the details let’s take a look at what the final result will be after we compress with the MSBuild Extension Pack. See the table below for the comparison for two different projects.
From the table above we can see that we can gain a significant amount of additional compression by using the MSBuild extension pack.
Below is the content that I pated into the .csproj file. I’ll paste it in it’s entirety and then explain.
<PropertyGroup>
<EnableCompressVsix Condition=" '$(EnableCompressVsix)'=='' ">true</EnableCompressVsix>
<BuildLib Condition=" '$(BuildLib)'=='' ">$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\Build\Lib\</BuildLib>
</PropertyGroup>
<UsingTask AssemblyFile="$(BuildLib)MSBuild.ExtensionPack.dll" TaskName="MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Compression.Zip"/>
<Target Name="CompressVsix"
AfterTargets="CreateVsixContainer"
DependsOnTargets="PrepareReplceVsixTemp"
Condition=" '$(EnableCompressVsix)'=='true' ">
<!-- copy the file to the obj folder and then party on it -->
<MakeDir Directories="$(_TmpVsixDir);$(_TmpVsixDir)\Extracted\"/>
<Copy SourceFiles="$(TargetVsixContainer)"
DestinationFolder="$(_TmpVsixDir)">
<Output TaskParameter="CopiedFiles" ItemName="_TmpVsixCopy"/>
</Copy>
<!-- extract out the .zip file -->
<MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Compression.Zip
TaskAction="Extract"
ExtractPath="$(_TmpVsixDir)Extracted\"
ZipFileName="@(_TmpVsixCopy->'%(FullPath)')"/>
<ItemGroup>
<_FilesToZip Remove="@(_FilesToZip)"/>
<_FilesToZip Include="$(_TmpVsixDir)Extracted\**\*"/>
</ItemGroup>
<MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Compression.Zip
TaskAction="Create"
CompressFiles="@(_FilesToZip)"
ZipFileName="%(_TmpVsixCopy.FullPath)"
RemoveRoot="$(_TmpVsixDir)Extracted\"
CompressionLevel="BestCompression" />
<Delete Files ="$(TargetVsixContainer)"/>
<Copy SourceFiles="%(_TmpVsixCopy.FullPath)" DestinationFiles="$(TargetVsixContainer)" />
</Target>
<Target Name="PrepareReplceVsixTemp" DependsOnTargets="CreateVsixContainer">
<ItemGroup>
<_VsixItem Remove="@(_VsixItem)"/>
<_VsixItem Include="$(TargetVsixContainer)" />
<_TmpVsixPathItem Include="$(IntermediateOutputPath)VsixTemp\%(_VsixItem.Filename)%(_VsixItem.Extension)"/>
</ItemGroup>
<PropertyGroup>
<_TmpVsixDir>%(_TmpVsixPathItem.RootDir)%(_TmpVsixPathItem.Directory)</_TmpVsixDir>
</PropertyGroup>
<RemoveDir Directories="$(_TmpVsixDir)"/>
</Target>
The snippet above perform the following actions.
- Remove the old VsixTemp folder from any previous build if it exists
- Copy the source .vsix to the intermediate output path (i.e. obj\debug or obj\release)
- Extract out the contents to a folder
- Re-zip the file using MSBuild extension pack
- Replace the output .vsix with the compressed one
When building now the .vsix in the output folder should be smaller than it was before.
In my case I have copied the necessary assemblies from the MSBuild Extension pack and placed them in the projects repository. For the Zip task you’ll need the following files.
- MSBuild.ExtensionPack.dll
- Ionic.Zip.DLL
In my case I’ve placed them in a folder named Build\lib\.
You should be able to copy/paste what I have here into your VSIX projects. You’ll need to update the path to the MSBuild extension pack assemblies if you put them in a different location. Note: I’ve only tested this with Visual Studio 2012.
The MSBuild elements used here is pretty straight forward. If you have any questions on this let me know.
You can find the source for the Farticus project at https://github.com/ligershark/Farticus/. Please send us a Pull (my finger) Request.
Thanks,
Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi | http://msbuildbook.com | @SayedIHashimi
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