DSL from 2005 to 2008

Spending 2 days for migrating Sculpture from VS2005 to VS2008 is unexpected time, we expect that we will convert it by the Visual Studio 2008 wizards, and then press F5 to test the framework.

I shocked when I read the article that shipped with Visual Studio SDK 2008 tell us:
“To migrate your project from VS2005 to VS2008 Create a new solution and copy your code files to it”

Its ok we follow the guide and migrate the project, some problems face us while converting that take some time to fix it, I want to explain these problems here to avoid the readers from take the same time.

1. VS2008 don’t copy the DLLs to GAC during the debugging mode, that’s great new feature but let us confused a little to be familiar with this new manner, the problem that if you have a copy of the dsl.dll and dslpackage.dll in your GAC, the debugging mode will run from them neglecting any other version on your machine, so you update the code and build then run and nothing change, so you must keep in mind that never debug your DSL project while you have a version installed in the GAC.

2. Commands, which converted from CTC to XML with extension VSCT, consuming some time to be familiar with this new format, we try Perl script [ConvertCTCToVSCT.pl] but it does not work correctly, where we add the commands by including Header file to the CTC file, so we convert it manually, after some of work it seems nice and easy to work with.
As a short Description about the new format

• To make groups use:
Just change the Group id, and the Parent id to your needs

• To Make Buttons use:

• The final thing you must know Symbols, where each of the previous IDs (groups and buttons) must be set its value in the Symbols section as follow:
Change the “guidCmdSet” value to match the one in your GeneratedVSCT.vsct file.

3. The last problem face us while migrating to VS2008 was DSL Editor PowerToy, still does not supported in VS2008, I hope to see new version soon, I will discuss how we overcome this problem in a dedicated post to be available for all DSL Editor PowerToy lovers.