Ever since moving across the building here at Synergex, and leaping from PSG Consultant (development side) to Account Manager (sales side), I’ve harbored a secret: I love FREE stuff.
A deep-seated love of FREE isn’t something that gets you hired in a sales role, and it’s certainly not the sort of thing on which to build an entire business model. More often than not, FREE will eventually mean only that you’re FREE to pursue other careers, other activities, and other (less material) lifestyles. I’ve had to work hard to limit my use of the word FREE without attaching caveats, footnotes, or asterisks.
Today, things have changed. I have now been given the opportunity to tell you about a couple of FREE tools you can use with your Synergy development: the Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Shell and Synergy Language Integration (SLI) for Visual Studio.
When Synergy/DE 9.3 shipped at the end of 2009, a new product was added to the suite of tools. SLI, available for FREE download, allowed you to develop your Synergy applications from within the Visual Studio IDE. However, one of the requirements to use it was Visual Studio 2010 Professional (or better). You couldn’t install SLI on one of the free “Express” flavors of Visual Studio, which only give you support for a specific language and contain a reduced feature set. This posed a barrier for some Synergex customers who might otherwise have been interested in trying out Synergy .NET, but found that it would require the outright purchase of Visual Studio before they could even play with the idea of a .NET version of some (or all) of their application.
Quite recently, I was eavesdropping on the developers as they took a break near the Jolt Cola fridge on the other side of the building (now and then, I stand around in the shadows nearby to get my Development Fix). This particular skulking exercise paid off big, and I learned of a little-known, free distribution of Visual Studio called the Integrated Shell. I raced back to my desk, and punched in the search on Google. From Microsoft’s description of the product:
The Visual Studio integrated shell includes the integrated development environment (IDE), debugger, and source control integration. No programming language is included. Although the integrated shell does not include programming languages, it does provide a framework that allows you to add programming languages.
“Hey!” I would have said had anyone been around, “WE have a language that their framework already supports!” Before you could say “FREE” a thousand times fast, I’d downloaded the Integrated Shell and SLI, and had installed both without a hitch.
The real test came later that evening at home when I opened up Visual Studio and tried to create a new project. I chose a Synergy Windows Forms project to start —yes, it was right there for me to select—and voila! I was off to the races, putting Synergy code behind button clicks, analyzing the strings put into text boxes, creating ArrayLists of ISAM records and pushing them into DataGridViews. I even ported an older application that I had, which creates dummy data for a contacts database, and got it up and running in .NET with little effort and no code changes. Three hours after beginning, and with the clock inching closer and closer to 1:30am, I decided my race was over and it was time to hit the sack.
As I laid my head back on the pillow, I rued the fact that in a few short hours my alarm would be blaring. I tried to figure out what had possessed me to spend three hours playing with a product I already knew how to use, doing things I already knew how to do, and typing code I already knew how to type. I was going to pay for this tomorrow…
And that’s when the answer (and the irony) hit me: I would be paying tomorrow because I simply love FREE a little too much, and can’t resist the enticement of getting to play with a product for no other reason than it was FREE.
I also immediately knew that I had to share this discovery with others. If you’re anything like me, then I *highly* recommend that you give it a shot yourself; there’s nothing quite as cool as watching an old green screen application come to life with a brand new GUI.
We recently ran our full product tests with the Integrated Shell to verify that all works well. We found a couple limitations that you may run into: 1) the Visual Studio Toolbox does not display some third-party controls; and 2) ClickOnce deployment is not supported. So, eventually you’ll want to get the full version of Visual Studio. There’s a lot more that you can do when you have access to premium features. In the meantime, this is a great option to get started for free. You can download the FREE Visual Studio Integrated Shell here, and you can get your hands on the SLI installer in the Synergy/DE Resource Center. You’ll also need a Windows version of Synergy/DE, but if you’re a Synergy DevPartner that’s not a problem either.
If you’re not a DevPartner, and therefore don’t have access to the Resource Center or Windows downloads, then Synergex has something special just for you. Since you’ve taken the time to read this far, we will reward you for it: Call your Synergy/DE account manager before the end of April, and we’ll give you a Windows version of Synergy/DE (plus the SLI plug-in) to try out for the next 6 months, absolutely FREE.
What do you have to lose but a bit of sleep?
See our website for more information about Synergy .NET.
See Microsoft’s website for more information about Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Shell.
