Tag Archives: Menu Option

Another Home Run for Roku

First Roku came out with a digital media player the size of a small external hard drive for $99 that allowed you to stream Netflix On Demand content to your TV.

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Then Roku provided High Definition output giving you the ability to watch much of Netflix’s content in High Definition.

Now, Roku has teamed with Amazon to provide the Amazon.com Video On-Demand Store on the Roku player.

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This week Roku is pushing a firmware update that give you the ability to surf the Amazon.com Video On-Demand Store from the comfort of your living room couch in a very comfortable lean back mode of entertainment.

Setup is easy, all you need to do is go to www.amazon.com/roku and link your Roku box to your Amazon.com account and you’re done.  Then, you just navigate to the Amazon.com On-Demand Video menu option and you get a very nice menu system that givesyou access to over 40,000 Movies and TV Series that you can either rent or buy to watch on your Roku device.

This in my opinion is the start of the future of digital content. Way to go Roku, my hat’s off to you!

Adventures in Extending the Service Factory

I’ve been trying to add a couple of additional projects and item templates to the Service Factory for workflows and workflow activities. I thought I’d try to use the same techniques that the Service Factory was using to dynamically bind the menu options using the ProjectIsInRoleReference helper in the Binding.xml recipe.

 

So I did the following:

  1. 1. Added new roles WorkflowRole and ActivitiesRole to the file WSSF\Modeling.CodeGeneration\Source\Enums\ServiceFactoryRoleType.cs. I did this so that the Project Mapping helpers would incorporate the new roles into the ProjectMappingTable and get picked up by the ProjectIsInRoleReference helper.
  2. 2. Added the project templates to Templates\Projects.
  3. 3. Added the projects to the WCF and ASMX.vstemplate files.
  4. 4. Added new item templates to Templates\Items to use when the user selects the menu option to create a workflow or activity.
  5. 5. Added unbound recipes to unfold the templates. I used the CreateTranslator recipe as an example.
  6. 6. Added actions to the Binding.xml using the RefCreator and the ProjectIsInRoleReference just like the action for the CreateTranslator recipe.

 

When I created a new ASMX or WCF Implementation project, the new projects templates got unfolded without issue. But when I right clicked on either the workflow or activities project I did not see the menu options to launch the recipes on the context menu.

 

At first I thought maybe the ProjectIsInRoleReference helper was not working, but I added debug output to indicate whether it found a match or not and everything was showing up correctly.

 

So I was at a loss as to why the menu options didn’t show up. I even tried to bind the recipes to the projects but still no luck. I dug out the older Extensibility Walkthroughs from the Service Factory CTP and there was an example for adding a new recipe through the binding.xml file. It seems that because we are testing in the Experimental Hive you need to run the following command to reset the context menus:

devenv /rootsuffix Exp /Setup

 

Once I ran the command and then restarted Visual Studio under the experimental hive the menu options showed up.  This behavior is not really apparent and I couldn’t find anything in the GAX/GAT documentation. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that running under the experimental hive is rather new for GAX/GAT and until the Service Factory you had to use the Clarius SFT to run under the experimental hive.