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AddOn Studio Released

News | Dec. 15, 2007 (7 months, 1 week ago) | by asp | via blogs.msdn.com | Filed in World of Warcraft

Dan Fernandez, a developer at Microsoft has announced the release of a World of Warcraft addon IDE based off of Microsoft Visual Studio.

It features

  • Visual Design Surface for visually designing your controls in World of Warcraft in a drag and drop manner.
  • Lua code editor with syntax hi-lighting and code completion.
  • Intellisense for FrameXML.
  • Automatically generates TOC files.
  • Auto generated event LUA event handlers.
  • Automatic deployment while developing
  • ACE2 addon development wizards

All in all really neat stuff. I personally love Visual Studio. A demonstration video is available here

Read Dan's blog and send some feature suggestions

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5 months, 2 weeks ago

Im having the same problems as grimmeld

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7 months, 1 week ago

First things first: I already had Visual Studio.Net 2005 on my computer.

I have installed the complete package and opened the addon studio. The first run gave me problems on the enviroment settings. The import fixed it although import and export also gave problems (i have the addon studio installed on another drive, is that problematic?) and still it keeps asking for the enviroment settings.

When i try to save a project it states: "Operation could not be completed. No such interface supported"

Also, only the tutorials, and additional documentation (referring to the main page of WowAce or WowWiki, which has no info about Addon Studio) are avaliably in the help menu, is that normal?

Further more, chaninging the XML code does not automatically change the addon when looking at it visually. And is it just me or does changing an object's properties not always work quite perfect (visually)? The toc file gets no updates when the properties of the addon are changed, and changing the name of the addon results not in the change of the eventual name of build result (not the files that are already built, but the files that come after the build). Are all this paragraph's problems the cause of not being able to save the project on my behalf or do more people experience this?

I love this concept and i hope these problems will soon be fixed.

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7 months, 1 week ago

Shota, you don't have to d/l that stuff seperately. The program comes with the VS 2008 shell files, and will install them if you don't already have them. If you don't have the .Net 3.5 stuff, it will ask you if you want to d/l them, and will take you to the necessary site. All in all, I like this IDE, but it is still a bit limited in what you can do (the visual layout stuff that is).

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7 months, 1 week ago

You'd think the author would make mention of what's necessary in order to use the program - and where to get it.

Netframework 3.5's source is obvious enough - just run Microsoft Update manually, and select "Custom
" to ensure you're given the option of downloading it.

Virtual Studio 2008 shell... I SUPPOSE it's somewhere on MS's site, but I rarely have any luck searching their site (I usually have to Google what I'm looking for). I presume it's a free runtime only program.

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7 months, 1 week ago

I found that all the required applications were included and installed. Perhaps this is because I did not have any other versions of Visual Studio already installed.

I went thru the included tutorial and was able to create the MyFirstAddon is instructs. After resolving so problems.

1) It uses self. WoW complained that this should be self:
2) The example mod looks for target change event and changes a text label on a form to "Hello, targetname" but it doesn' account for nil, so if your target changes from something to nothing an error occurs.

Errors in Tutorials in my case encourages learning, but it might put some people off.

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7 months, 1 week ago

I cant seem to get the Intellisense to work properly. Anyone know why?

(Im running an old version of Visual studio tho. Trying a newer version now.)

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7 months, 1 week ago

Hmm, I can't even get started.
I download the program from their site and isntall it - I have installed .Net 3.5 etc as well.

Now, when I run the program is says "Invalid License data. Reinstall is required" - and I keep getting this message, no matter how many times I reinstall...

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7 months, 1 week ago

Wharep: I had the exact same problem, and asked on http://www.codeplex.com/WarcraftAddOnStudio and did get this tip:

I was stuck at this problem aswell, the problem to solve this is:
DO NOT START Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Instead, start: Addon Studio for World of Warcraft

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7 months, 1 week ago

EDIT: I fixed this by uninstalling VB, C++, and C# off of my system, and scanning with Registry Mechanic fixing any errors. Restarting, and then trying the install again. This is a very cool program after you get it to work.

I can't get this to setup at all. I go thru the normal setup. Launch into it.
Anytime I try to open anything from the menu, or load a new project I get the error:

Could not load type 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.IOleMenuCommand' from assembly
'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.8.0, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a'.

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7 months, 1 week ago

Hi All,

Un fortunately it does not run on a mac directly, but if you have the new intel macs and can run WoW on mac leopard and Windows, then you can make use of the addons. Personally even thou the above is so cool, the benefit of using the above add ons is not big enough yet, to stop me running majority of my gamplay in leopard.

I found the leopard platform far more stable then Windows XP (not using vista until, Microsoft get it right).

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7 months, 1 week ago

Skorn i think that say's it self , its designed to use on Computers who have Windows installed.

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7 months, 1 week ago

If it's made by microsoft then the chances it will ever run on a mac or ubuntu platform are very very small. Remember halo 2 for PC NEEDS windows vista to run?

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7 months, 1 week ago

Using Halo 2 as an example for a game that needs Vista to run is sort of counterproductive. It runs fine on XP with like two minor tweaks, but I boycotted the game for "requiring" Vista.

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7 months, 1 week ago

It downloads and installs .NET Framework 3.5 and the Visual Studio 2008 shell. So yea, you gotta have Windows :-)

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7 months, 1 week ago

Doesn't work on a mac? :(

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7 months, 1 week ago

Does any version of Visual Studio?

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7 months, 1 week ago

not bad, though it would be better if it had the current api in a library to go with it.

The tutorial provided is also off a bit, so if you have no knowledge of coding in this language or are used to the ide then you might be stuck for a little while.

though all in all, not bad for the blossoming addon writer.

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7 months, 1 week ago

The Intellisense works off the XML files found under %InstallDir%/Documentation. It has a very simple format which was generated based on www.wowwiki.com . All you need to do is to have the API reference in this format.

Another planned feature is documentation comments that Ace uses. Make your voice heard which documentation feature you miss the most :)

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7 months, 1 week ago

This is actually a huge undertaking, having just worked with a group to complete a full api reference I know. If all goes well though it will be.

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7 months, 1 week ago

You can use a seperate program to download the relevant data and save it as an LUA file that the addon can import. It means you only get "static" data from the last point you updated before you launch the game (unless you reloadui) but it does the trick.

Most in-game DKP addons work by the same kinda system (a PHP file on the webserver generates an LUA file and a seperate program downloads said LUA file to the right place).

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