Runtime Flow blog (Understanding a control flow in a running .NET application)

With the Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 1 release this week, I wanted to verify that Text Sharp – Visual Studio 2010 text clarity tuner is compatible with the standalone LightSwitch installation:

Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta standalone IDE startup

Unfortunately, running the TextSharp_12.vsix installer gave me the “This extension is not installable on any currently installed products” error:

Visual Studio Extension Installer error

.vsixmanifest for Text Sharp contained the following list of supported products:

    <SupportedProducts>
      <VisualStudio Version="10.0">
        <Edition>Pro</Edition>
      </VisualStudio>
    </SupportedProducts>

I looked for documentation specifying what needs to be added for LightSwitch, bug found absolutely nothing. Then I decided to look inside the vsix installer using Runtime Flow.

With the error message box on the screen, using Process Explorer I found the path to the vsix installer and that its command line contained just path to TextSharp_12.vsix. I installed Runtime Flow on the same machine for LightSwitch IDE (no problems this time) and set up customized monitoring run:

Runtime Flow customized run settings for VSIX installer monitoring

I received the same installation error under Runtime Flow monitoring and tried to find the call to show message box (that should be close to the place when the error occurs). I thought it would be the last call in the Runtime Flow tree, but after opening several levels of calls I didn’t feel that I was going in the right direction:

Going to the last call in the Runtime Flow tree

Then I opened the Runtime Summary window and for VSIXInstaller.exe several SupportedSKU classes immediately caught my attention:

Classes and functions called in the VSIX installer

I selected get_SupportedSKUsList, clicked Locate in flow and appeared at the beginning of a very interesting sequence of calls:

Supported editions check in the VSIX installer

It was clearly visible that the supported edition strings were compared with VSLS and returned false. Indeed adding the VSLS edition to .vsixmanifest in Text Sharp solved the original problem:

    <SupportedProducts>
      <VisualStudio Version="10.0">
        <Edition>Pro</Edition>
        <Edition>VSLS</Edition>
      </VisualStudio>
    </SupportedProducts>

Successful start of the Text Sharp installer

Successful Text Sharp installation