Continuous Disintegration

(Note: This is an old post that was stuck in my backlog. I am publishing it now with the intent of writing more VS extensibility posts.) I have a colleague who laments the desire of developers to have (and tool developers to put) ‘everything in the IDE’. Anyone who has struggled with integrated source control fussing up a solution structure can probably identify with this view to some degree. Still, anyone who has used the NUnit GUI test runner for lack of having ReSharper or TestDriven.NET has had a taste of the case for IDE integration. When building small custom tools to enhance developer productivity and make it easy to perform mechanical tasks, why not stick them in Visual Studio? It turns out, it’s pretty easy to do. Consider a situation in which a developer has user accounts for each tenant of a multitenant application. These accounts get deactivated after a period of non-use, so they need to get reactivated in order for the developer to troubleshoot problems that manifest onl...

First, I neglected to mention in my previous post that I found Paul Cowan's blog to be a tremendous help in figuring out how build a DSL with Boo and Rhino DSL . Second, I wanted to point out that, because this is an internal DSL written in Boo, it's still possible to use familiar programming constructs in the DSL scripts. For example, I could dynamically generate the team definitions from some other datasource, like so: stats = GetData() for row as DataRow in stats.Rows: define row["name"]: defense Determine.DefenseFromRanking(cast(int,row["defenseRanking"])) pass_offense Determine.PassOffenseFromRanking(cast(int,row["passOffenseRanking"])), with_qb_type(Determine.QbTypeFromRatingAndExperience(cast(double,row["qbRating"]), cast(int,row["qbExperience"]))) run_offense Determine.RunOffenseFromRanking(cast(int,row["runOffenseRanking"])) where GetData() returns a DataTable with multiple team statistics, and Det...