Re: ANN: VisualAda (Ada Integration for Visual Studio 2017 & 2019) release 1.2.0

[alby.gamper@gmail.com]

On Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 7:20:14 AM UTC+10, Greg wrote:
> Alex, sorry, been hammered with deadlines and too tired at night to even look at a screen.
> 
> 1) and 2) would go a long way to helping others starting down this path, and that's the point, at least from my perspective. Everyone talks about promoting the language, and to me, this is one of the more outstanding ways I've seen.
> 
> 3) I can't believe you can't set dependencies as you say, but who knows, you might be right. If not, a mention in the README should certainly be sufficient.
> 
> 4) Figured something like that.
> 
> 5) I did monkey around with changing the target runtimes myself to more recent ones, but didn't seem to make much difference, but defaulting to more recent ones is definitely the way to go.
> 
> I guess just emphasizing that you HAVE to build THIS and THIS first (the WinRT stuff) before using Visual Ada, you know, step A, B, and C - as you said, would help a lot. 
> 
> I suppose I could start doing PRs for documentation suggestions or other issues of course, on the WinRT stuff. When/if VisualAda goes to GitHub, same thing.
> 
> I'm just having fun doing this, and hey, anything I can do to help. I have absolutely no need for GtkAda, and doing a Windows app in Ada is still to me  mind-blowing.
> 
> I did try to build a UWP DLL the other day and ran into an error, can't remember what it was exactly, but when I get a chance, I'll pass along the details.
> 
> I strongly suspect deploying a VisualAda UWP app to Xbox WILL work, just haven't had the chance to set it up yet. But will soon.
> 
> Again, thanks for all of this incredible work,
> Greg

Hi Greg

I apologise, I actually missed this post (and replied to you later post without
seeing this one). So in response to your points, which are very much appreciated

1) and 2) I have already posted some changes to the GitHub readme's for both
winrt_runtime and winrt project to reflect the dependencies and additional info.
PR's are very welcome for the documentation, But bear in mind that the winrt
source code is generated of the back of the winmd metadata, so changes to the
bindings need to be generic!. I am happy to accept PR's for winrt_runtime.

BTW, Thanks for your comment's regarding my work, I in part embarked on this
journey. because I saw a need to promote Ada outside of its traditional use
case in the safety critical/embedded/Realtime markets and I always considered
Ada as a general purpose language applicable to any environment. To this end I
saw that providing bindings to Win32, WinRT and providing "Visual Studio"
integration would encourage young graduates / IT professionals to at least be
given the tools to develop great Ada applications in a familiar development IDE
and lets face it, MS does have an impact (be it free or other wise) on the
choice of what IDE is used within an IT shop.

3) I have done some more research (ie googling) and may have found a workaround
to being able to set project dependencies for VS solutions with multiple
projects, have a look in your spare time :-) TL:DR

https://blog.tonysneed.com/2011/09/14/build-a-multi-project-visual-studio-template/

4) and 5) I have as yet not had a chance to look at this in detail yet, will
do this over the weekend, while looking at the packaging/install issue with
VisualAda.

On a side note: what's your thoughts on the following idea's

a) Use Nuget to install/reference the WinRT dependencies. But this does mean
that each UWP app has its own copy of the WinRT dependencies. Not ideal in my
view (unless of course you are diligent and update your refences regularly) and
definably / probably NOT workable in a very disciplined IT environment.

b) I am not sure that a UWP app can be distributed with a "native DLL" via
Windows Store (as opposed to statically linking to a LIB). If it cant, do you
see any value in keeping the "UWP DLL" template ? Note that apps that are side
loaded (ie within a corporate env and NOT distributed via the Windows Store) are
not under the same restriction