I’m at TechEd this week. Arrived here in humid Orlando late afternoon and scuttled over to the convention center and dropped by the Tablet booth where I met Julia Lerman (Tablet speaker and blogger) and Arin Goldberg (from the Microsoft Tablet PC team). After a bit of catching up on things, I described the ink integration I’ve been working on with Visual Studio and Arin said I had to go talk with Douglas Hodges, architect of the Visual Studio integration services. I was game so we went over to the Visual Studio booth where Douglas was working and for the next two hours he gave me a hands on tour Visual Studio 2005 integration. It made the whole trip worthwhile.
Douglas walked through a couple different implementation scenarios showing me at the interface level what I needed to call to make an ink annotation tool professional grade.
I hadn’t considered deeply enough the issues involved with integrating into a source code control system, for instance. I didn’t even know it was possible. Now I see that services are available and it’s something that doesn’t look too complicated, so I’ve got to make this work.
While I was in my impromptu training session, blogger Dr. X dropped by and pointed out some samples he’d written that I might want to check out. One leverages markers in a file–something I need. The sample code is written in C++, so my first step will be to port his sample to C# since that’s what I’ll be using for the rest of the annotation system. Porting Dr. X’s sample code will give me a good chance to gain familiarity with Visual Studio’s extensibility API.
I know it’s only day two of TechEd and that I have five more days in Orlando, but I can’t wait to get back home now to work on this Visual Studio 2005 project. I’m contemplating installing Visual Studio 2005 Beta on my Tablet with me, but I’m reluctant to do so since it’s beta software–but I really, really want to start this right now. Maybe I will install it tonight. Decisions. Decisions.