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October 04, 2006

VDPROJ replace shouldn't be Votive

While discussing the possible future replacement of Visual Studio Deployment Projects I mentioned that it would be nice if the replacement was also open source and backwards compatible with previous versions of Visual Studio and not just a feature of Orcas.

Robmen pointed out that there already was an open source add-in called Votive.

While it meets part of the definition of what I said ( an open source add-in for 2003/2005 ) it certainly does not meet the definition of a replacement for vdproj.

Personally I have no intention of authoring anything except the most simple installation fragments in direct XML regardless of now nice the text editor gets. I expect a graphical RAD tool that is designed for user work flows and data validation. Beyond that, let that tool store the data in XML behind the scenes and use WiX to build the project.

My best analogy is the way VS2005 handles Forms and the way InstallShield exposes views and the Direct Editor. I want a designer view and a code view. I want to do most of my work in the designer view knowing that it's really just generating rock solid XML for me in that I can choose to tweak in the code view.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"I want a designer view and a code view. I want to do most of my work in the designer view knowing that it's really just generating rock solid XML for me in that I can choose to tweak in the code view."

Amen, brother.

Anonymous said...

"I want a designer view and a code view. I want to do most of my work in the designer view knowing that it's really just generating rock solid XML for me in that I can choose to tweak in the code view."

Amen, brother.