Nested Shapes in SDK 1.1

Question

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

Answer 1

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!

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Answer 2

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.

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Jean-Marc

Answer 3

 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

Answer 4

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.

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Jean-Marc