Updated SharePoint Module Extensions for NPCL Editor
Today we have released a compatibility upgrade for the SharePoint Module extensions for the NPCL Schema Editor.
Due to some binary incompatibilities bewteen the Visual Studio SDKs for VS 2005 and VS 2008, the SharePoint Module Extensions for the NPCL Schema Editor that are provided with the current release of the SharePoint Module (SharePoint Module 3.1 Hotfix 1) do not load correctly when using Visual Studion 2008 and version 3.0 of the NPCL Schema Editor.
The new release is intended for use ONLY with version 3.0 of the NPCL Schema Editor in Visual Studio 2008 - for details and download please see this earlier posting.
The updated SharePoint Module Extensions can be downloaded from here. To install, simply copy the contents of the zip file into the Extensions directory as described in the documentation for the NPCL Schema Editor.
NPCL Schema Editor for Visual Studio 2008
We are pleased to announce the release of version 3.0 of the NetworkedPlanet NPCL Schema Editor and NPCL Tools for Visual Studio.
The NPCL Schema Editor is a graphical editor that runs inside Visual Studio and provides developers with a drag-and-drop interface for creating topic map ontologies expressed in NetworkedPlanet's NPCL format, the format used by the EPiServer Module and SharePoint Module as well as other NetworkedPlanet tools.
The NPCL Tools for Visual Studio provides a bundle of new features to make it easier to work with NPCL files in Visual Studio. The current set of tools are:
- An MSBuild task for compiling multiple NPCL files into a single NPCL file for easy deployment;
- An MSBuild task for generating HTML documentation from an NPCL file;
- An NPCL Schema Editor extension that allows developers to add text and HTML documentation to the items in an NPCL schema;
- A Visual Studio project template for an NPCL Schema project that uses the MSBuild tasks to create a Visual Studio project for creating a large NPCL schema as a set of smaller, more easily managed NPCL files.
Most importantly of all, this new release is built on Visual Studio 2008.
As with previous releases, the NPCL Schema Editor and Tools for Visual Studio are provided free of charge and the latest version can be downloaded here.
NPCL Schema Editor Update
The NPCL Schema Editor is a plugin for Visual Studio 2005 that enables you to create topic map ontologies through a simple graphical interface. This is the tool that you can see me using in our SharePoint Module videos. The goal of the schema editor is to make it easy for developers or information architects to convert the domain model into a topic maps model. The editor has been designed to be extensible by supporting additional user-defined menu actions and we have separately released a set of extensions to enable the topic map ontology to be mapped against Content Types in a SharePoint site.
Over the last few months that the NPCL Schema Editor has been out we have come across a few issues with installation (especially on Vista / Server 2008 machines) and with our extensions mechanism for the NPCL Schema Editor. This new release of the NPCL Schema Editor fixes those issues.
The main changes are:
-
BUGFIX: Fixed extension loading code so that a copy of the NetworkedPlanet.Npcl.Vs.Dsl.DLL is no
longer required in the extensions directory. If you previously added this file to the
extensions directory to fix extension loading issues you should now delete that file. - NEW: The installer now includes policy files so that extensions that targeted version 2.0.0.0
or version 2.0.0.1 of the NPCL Schema Editor will continue to work after an upgrade. - NEW: Added README and INSTALL text files to the release package.
The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that we haven't yet upgraded this package to work with Visual Studio 2008. This is the next thing on the list and will be part of the forthcoming 2.1 release of the schema editor.
You can download the new NPCL Schema Editor from here. Please note that if you have a previous version of the schema editor installed you must uninstall that before attempting to install the new version.
I also found a couple of minor annoyances in the SharePoint Module extensions for the Schema Editor and fixed those. The updated extension package can be downloaded from here.
As usual if you have any comments or suggestions for improvements or, dare I say it, bug reports please send them to support@networkedplanet.com.
