VSTIE
You've heard of VSTO right? It's an acronym for Visual Studio Tools for Office.
I was doing the grocery shopping late last night, wandering from aisle to aisle, getting pissed off at the shelf fillers getting in my road all the time, and so I distracted myself by (of course) thinking about code.
Yes, I know. To amuse myself when I get bored I think about code. Sad isn't it? Hell, even if I'm not bored I'm generally thinking about code. Don't tell me to get a life, I already have one. Really!
Specifically I was thinking about IE explorer bars. I've been meaning to actually finishing off my work on them for ages now. Explorer bars for IE are an old fashioned beast - plain old COM interfaces all the way, but not too bad to write if you're comfortable in the C++ world. I've successfully done them in C++ and also VB6 - but getting them done in .net has been a bit of a challenge. A while ago someone posted on Code Project that they had it going in C#, which is cool - of course - but it wasn't VB. I've got the VB conversion all sorted out, it just needs to packaged into a nice library so that I can a) show how it was done and b) provide a framework for other people to write their own.
One of these days now...
Honest!
But anyway, I digress. Last night it struck me. We have VSTO, why don't we have VSTIE? Wouldn't that be cool? To already have the framework done, and provided to us all to use, would be sweet - which is why I've been wanting to write it - but if it was MS written and supported, then it's (possibly) going to be written better and stuff than what I could do (knowing them, it'd all be written in Managed C++ anyway, the cheaters). Is this a good idea?
Actually, sorta not. The big thing that I've noticed with managed IE extensions is the increased startup time of IE. Your managed extension needs to be JITted, and this takes time.
But if managed IE extensions were nGen'd first, then the startup time would probably be mucho-improved-o.
So what do you think? Am I dreaming? Would it be better released with whidbey, or IE7? Or is this a longhorn thing? You'd think IE7 would have some managed interfaces already being planned, wouldn't it? Who do I talk to about this?
Listening to: suicidal dream - silverchair - (3:12)