Visual Studio Add-in...

Whew! So here's the deal... I've been killing myself for the past few days writing the Visual Studio (2005 and 2008) Add-in for SOS. After days of head-shaking, throat-clearing, knuckle-popping, and ear-ringing (listening to Kristin's favorite music; what I call "angry-poppy-crap"), I have finally gotten to a point where I am in the last stages of testing. After I get some personal confirmation that it's behaving as desired, I'll be releasing here for you all. I'm hoping this only is another day or so out, but I really don't want to give you all something that acts crazy, doesn't load, or worse— gives you any of my aforementioned develo-phrenia symptoms.

A brief explanation of the Add-in is warranted, I beleive...

The Add-in adds your entire SOS menu (save for the Input/Output methods) in the context (right-click) menu of the code window. The item that shows directly on this menu is labeled "Snippets on Steroids", and houses everything else (so to not clutter your context menu. Under the root menu item are your snippet categories and snippets, labeled and nested just as they are currently in the SOS.Tray client. An example of the menu structure would be "Snippets on Steroids > Translation > ROT-13". When you click on a snippet, the text that is currently selected is simply fed to the snippet, then replaced by the output of it.

Developers— I know you can appreciate the simplicity of this one... How nice will it be to just select one of your long string literal SQL queries and run formatting or regex operations against it, take that same literal pasted into an XML document and HTML encode it in couple of clicks, or automatically encrypt your connection string with your company's proprietary algorithm that you hate the tool for (sorry; I had to throw that one in there). ¦¬]

Like I said, only another day or two. If you want to try it now, leave a comment and I'll shoot it over to you. I really think it's stable now though, so it shouldn't be long...

Wish me luck! (...and my testers; yikes!)

*** UPDATE ***

Click here to download the SOS Visual Studio Add-in (SOS.VSA) v0.1

Out of the gates...

Off to a good start, I believe. SOS has now hit v0.8 without even a public release. I'll be attaching an installer to the next post, and will soon after be monkeying around with Blogger to see if I can remember how to use it. ;)

Oh... what's SOS? Hmmm... ;Þ

Well, it's basically just a (hopefully useful) wrapper around a very simple concept of text manipulation. Let's face it. Most of us do things with text daily that are almost autonomous. Unfortunately, they aren't always as easy as we'd like. That's where SOS (Snippets on Steroids) was envisioned; in the muck.

So I'm out of the muck now, and have a little gem that I think you may find useful. Let me know if you do.

The application version may say "v0.8", but don't let it fool you. It's not going to be an official release (v1.0) until quite a few improvements that I'm in the process of hammering out.

This does, however raise the interesting point of "why would I make it publicly available if I wasn't even done with v1.0?" So glad you asked...

SOS is so much more than my pesky little application. It's a new freedom! Okay, not really... but it really is cool. ;)

SOS needs problems. I need people to post what they think SOS could do for their "block o' text". Take a look at some of the examples that I'll list soon, and try to think beyond them.

As many problems as it may need, it will never be free of the need of solutions. Developers, take this simple system and make a quick application (.NET console apps work quite well). I'll explain more in detail in subsequent posts, but I want to make sure I have everyone's ears.

Oh yeah! Before I forget... SOS is free. ;)