Software Factories in .NET, by Christian Weyer

.NET, eclipse, IBM Workplace, Microsoft, Rich Client, Technical, Visual Studio 1 Minute

I went to an interesting talk tonight by Christian Weyer, where he described some of the upcoming features in Visual Studio, namely Software Factories. Software Factories allow you to customize and extend Visual Studio much more easily than before, so you can bundle together things like wizards, context sensitive menu actions, code generation etc. The slides from the event are available here.

Being the good Java-devotee that I am (I’m not religious about it or anything, they pay me to care 🙂 ), I of course pointed out that this is, in many ways, very similar to Eclipse perspectives, which also allow you to easily (“easily” being relative of course) extend an Eclipse rich client application with organised packages of code in Plugins and Features. These plugins and features are used to do everything in Eclipse applications, like wizards, context sensitive menu actions, code generation etc (seeing a pattern here?).

As I promised to Christian and others, here are some useful links to Eclipse documentation on this subject:

  • This is the basic, high level description of Eclipse perspectives, more from a users point of view than a developers.
  • Eclipse Rich Client tutorials Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Part 2 is where it describes Perspectives best.
  • A book, in German (for you Christian 😉 ), on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).
  • A screencast on Eclipse RCP application development. All RCP applications are based on Perspectives.ISV Guide pic
  • And finally, a plug, my RedPaper called “IBM Workplace Managed Client: ISV Integration Guide“, which describes a number of different methods of writing Eclipse RCP applications based on the IBM Workplace Managed Client application. (It’s really good, honest!). Much of the practices and technology described in this paper are used in the upcoming Lotus Notes release, codename Hannover.

All in all, it was a very good talk, with a packed room. It’s just a pity there wasn’t a screening of Blade Runner in a private cinema, like the last time I saw Christian present, in 2004. I guess we were a bit spoiled that time!

P.S. Thanks to Kieran from Digerati for telling me about the event.

Published by Shane O'Sullivan

I am a software engineer and manager from Ireland. I spent 7 years working in Ireland from 2003 – 2010, then ten years in Silicon Valley from 2010 to 2020. In California I spent about 6.5 years at Facebook Engineering, the last three of which I was an engineering manager in the Ads organisation focusing on customer facing products for creating and managing ads. At Stripe I built the Developer Productivity organisation, with teams that were responsible for the use of the Ruby language, testing infrastructure, documentation, developer tooling (e.g. IDE integrations) and more. At Promise, I was Head of Engineering from 2018 – 2020, responsible for building the first few iterations of our products, hiring for all product roles, meeting with clients and investors, and anything else needed to get a tiny startup bootstrapped and successful. Now I’m back in Ireland, working on my next company. Coming soon (as of early 2023!). This blog contains my various musings on all things technical/interesting on the interweb and beyond.

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