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Initial Visual Studio Design time support added to master branch!


Achievement unlocked!


With the merge of Pull Request #213 (PR #213), Kenji Uno added support for Visual Studio Design Time also known as DDEX. 

A most wanted feature


From the statistics of pageviews I get from a previous post about design time support, I can affirm that this is a most wanted feature of Npgsql. And I'm very glad to say that Npgsql is finally having it. I'd like to thank Kenji Uno for all his hard work to make this happen. 

Npgsql DDEX support is done through an extension file which can be easily installed in Visual Studio. This is a much better situation than we had before where it was needed to use an experimental instance of Visual Studio. 


History


The code started with wwindcloud in PR #67 and Kenji started to play with it and said he was working to get it usable in VS2012 and 2013


In order to be able to add more fixes to the code, Kenji started the PR 213 and started to add more features and fixes until now when we merged all the changes back to master branch.

How to use it


Kenji Uno wrote a tutorial about how to build and use this feature. Below are some screenshots from the tutorial.

Please, give it a try and let us know if it works for you. Remember that this is a work in progress, so you may face bugs and problems. 

I'd like to thank Kenji Uno for all his hard work to get this feature working. And also thank wwindcloud for the initial work.


Sample screenshots


Here is an screenshot when you double click the .vsix file to install the extension:





When you install it, you will be able to select it when creating a new data source connection:











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