Backbase in Visual Studio 2008 Express in 1 minute

Today I will reveal little secret on how your Visual Web Developer 2008 Express can be used as IDE for Backbase AJAX Framework.

It passed like a year since I posted anything related to Backbase, it happen that my routine ActionScript 3 and Flex tasks overtook my Backbase Evangelism so I basically had no time to do any AJAX, not only Backbase.

There are many changes happen since I touched Backbase last time, it was Backbase 4.0 EA build that was available for members of Development Committee. Today we have 4.2.1 available and good part about it is that licensing was reviewed in a better way. So even if you had to give up your idea of using Backbase when you experienced first time on builds 3.x and 4, you better reconsider it today.

Still, for those who does non-commercial applications - nothing changed,we cool.

If somehow happen that you still don't know a thing about Backbase, please visit official web site on http://www.backbase.com and you will find plenty of information including pretty good Development Network that you can find on http://bdn.backbase.com.

Now, back to our IDE thing. Many of you probably using already or at least heard that Microsoft have bunch of free tools for software and development. One of them is Visual Web Developer (VWD) that you can download from http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/

Could be surprising for some Microsoft haters, but Express editions works same good as their "bigger brothers", that are commercial editions. VWD's JavaScript, HTML, XML and etc fancy stuff support is just outstanding. A lot of nice improvements since VWD 2005...

So, for a start you need two things:

1. Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 (Download), and
2. Backbase Client Edition (Download)

After you downloaded VWD 2008, open it and let's configure it to use Backbase Schemas to be able to use Backbase markup languages:

• Click in menu Tools\Options. It will open "Options" dialog. There make sure you have selected [x] Show all settings.
• In options tree in the left pane select element Text Editor
• Select element XML,
• Inside of it select element Miscellaneous,on right pane you will see additional settings open:
  
• There is caching section with input box and "Browse..." button, click on it and it will open new dialog:
   
  This dialog shows you location of Schemas folder. This is a magic place you have to know about. If you know how to reach there manually, fine, if not, right-click on it, select properties, and then copy path of the Schemas folder.
• Next step is to unpack zip file you downloaded from Backbase, if you still haven't done it.
• Now, in this unpacked content locate this path: \client-edition\tools\schemas\
• Select all files from there except the xhtml11 folder and copy them into Schemas folder that you just discovered in VWD2008.
• When you done, go inside of xhtml11 folder of your Backbase installation, select all files there and copy them into Schemas folder of VWD2008. Don't worry if you might have warning appeared that you overwriting some files. It's safe to overwrite.
• Now restart your VWD2008.

You've got you Backbase Schemas and intelli-sense!

Now when you create some XML file you can use proper Backbase markup in it.

<

b:window xmlns:b="http://www.backbase.com/2006/btl" id="windowRssLink" label="RSS Widget" open="false">
</b:window>