Add-In Development Goes Mainstream

Posted by Stropp on December 16, 2007

If you spend your spare time developing add-ins for World of Warcraft, other than spare time spent playing WoW that is, you might be interested to know that Microsoft has just the thing to make add-in development much nicer.

For years now, software developers have been using all manner of means to develop software. Windows C/C++/C# developers have been lucky to use the Visual Studio IDE, that’s Integrated Development Environment, to assist with the art of writing programs. In fact I’m one of those developers. I’ve used the Visual Studio products for around a decade now I reckon.

So my ears pricked up when I saw an announcement for a Visual Studio extension called Addon Studio for World of Warcraft. It’s available through the Codeplex website which is Microsofts open source hosting site.

It uses the Visual Studio 2008 Shell to provide the following functionality. These points have been taken from the Codeplex page.

• AddOn Studio includes a set of toolbox controls that you can drag-and-drop onto the designer to visually design the layout of your addon including popular Visual Studio features like Snap lines which enable you to visually align controls.
• AddOn Studio includes a powerful Lua code editing environment including syntax highlighting, colorization, collapsible functions, built-in IntelliSense support for Warcraft functions and events, IntelliSense Code Snippets for common Lua language constructs, code navigation features like bookmarks and Go To Declaration, and all IDE settings are customizable.
• AddOn Studio provides built-in support for FrameXML schema validation for addon developers who want to manually edit and customize FrameXML markup.
• AddOn Studio also takes the hassle out of building the Table of Contents (TOC) file by automatically building it based on what files are in your project.
• The Addon Studio property window shows all of the properties and events available for a Lua control or frame and enables one-click creation of event handlers like a button_OnClick event.
• AddOn Studio includes lots more features including project templates for creating Ace2 addons, automatic deployment to your Warcraft directory, Task Window, Error List for FrameXML and Lua parsing errors, TGA and MP3 file format support, powerful search-and-replace features, and its fully extensible so that developers can build additional tools and editors to improve addon development.

The Visual Studio Extensibility Team blog also has a post up hailing the release of Addon Studio for World of Warcraft. Along with the details it has the following video of the recent TechEd conference where the Addon Studio for World of Warcraft was demonstrated to many cheers. Here it is.

Video: World of Warcraft with Halo 3 Sounds using AddOn Studio

While the video certainly makes it look like a snap to develop an add-in for WoW, I’m not sure it would be quite so simple. Writing a useful add-in would be a little more difficult that a five minute practiced demo. But I have no doubt the whole development process would be made much easier with this tool.

If you develop World of Warcraft add-ins, I’d like to hear what you think about this tool. Will you switch from your current method for creating add-ins, or are you not impressed?

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