Nested Shapes in SDK 1.1

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:41:25 Z

Hi,
DSL Nested shapes routing support was due to be added to SDK 1.1 according to the VSX team blog entry at http://blogs.msdn.com/vsxteam/archive/2008/08/05/what-have-we-been-up-to.aspx.

The official release announcement only mentioned Print Preview.

Did this feature make it? Is there any documentation?

thanks,
Pete

Nested Shapes in SDK 1.1

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:41:09 Z

Hello Pete,

Yes, this feature has been added and the DSL team are working on a sample to demonstrate this new feature, which was done into the runtime, but not the authoring.

I believe this sample will be out in a few days. And I'll let you know as soon as possible.

Thanks!

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.

Nested Shapes in SDK 1.1

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:56:27 Z

Hello.
I posted something about nested shapes in SDK 1.1 on my blog ([DSL Tools] Support of Nested shapes in Visual Studio 2008 SP1). The sample should follow soon on CodeGallery.

Jean-Marc

Nested Shapes in SDK 1.1

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:00:41 Z

Hi Jean-Marc,

Thanks for clarifying this. I have implemented nested shapes before in one of my DSL projects and implemented similar code.

To allow shapes to be re-parented by moving them from container to container I had to implement a lot of custom code.

Among the problems I found were Z-Order issues where the re-parenting of shapes caused the shapes to be hidden behind the new parent, this also happened in collapsing and expanding the container. It seemed that the Z-Order property was automagically generated from the order of the shapes in the child shapes collection and after trying and failing to control this I had to override the implementation of Z-Order.

In my opinion the issues outlined in your first post were not blocking, but the Z-Order bug was pretty irritating, more frustrating however was the amount of effort required to implement nested shapes. I guess that some of this stuff will get ironed out with the increased inhouse re-use of the dsl runtime for ms projects. I would like to say that I do truly believe that the DSL runtime and the tooling is a phenomenal achievement that has stood the test of time since VS 2005 with very little change and I'm glad to see people realizing is capability.

I will look forward to seeing the implementation of your 2nd post.

Thanks again,

Pete

Nested Shapes in SDK 1.1

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:40:18 Z

Thanks Pete for your nice feedback.

You are right, the Z-order problem was quite a nighmare implementing the 2nd proposition of the book. With the current implementation you'll be able to get rid of a lot of painful custom code.

I understand you are rather interested in the case when shapes can move outside of their parent. I'll write a second post as soon as I can.

Jean-Marc