Troubleshooting Plk Verification for Visual Studio Package in a VSIP Development Edition

Question

I have a custom domain specific language project which was developed a while back, was deployed and run on the same machine inside the normal Visual Studio hive with no problems.

Server has been reinstalled and I'm trying to setup the environment again, so that the normal hive (which is a Visual Studio VSIP Edition SP1, with Visual Studio 2008 SDK) can use the DSL.

But the VSPackage is not loading. The Package Load Analyzer gives me a "Plk Verification" error. "Failed to read one of the following values for the package {guid} - Company Name, Package Guid, Product Name, Product Version, Minimum Edition."

Now I understand if I was deploying to a non VSIP Edition (or running devenv with /noVSIP) I would need to get a Plk from Microsoft, but since I am running on the same development machine where the DSL is also developed, there should be a Development Plk. Visual Studio also tells me at the start:

VSIP: Developer edition, all third-party packages allowed to load.

If I start the DSL project and debug it in the experimental hive then everything works fine, the package is loaded and all custom editors are displayed.

Any idea on how to further troubleshoot this?

Is it possible that the problem lies in that the DSL project was created on a different server and even though I've recompiled everything on the new server that the development key is somehow related to the server and is attached in the project files somewhere? If so, any idea where?

Answer 1

That is surprising. Since you have the VSIP SDK installed and are not using the /noVSIP switch, I too would expect the PLK-checking mechanism to be disabled (regardless of hive). However the package load analyzer is indicating a problem, and the package load analyzer is probably a better judge of whether VS will load a package than we are.

Have you tried actually applying a PLK to your VSPackage? It's not that hard to do. See here for how to get a PLK and then next topic for how to apply it to your code. You can rebuild and change your VSPackage as almost much as you want after applying a PLK. The only things you can't change are the four values hashed and baked into the PLK. (These are the product name, package name, version string and the minimum required edition of visual studio. These four values you give when you request a PLK must match those registered with your VSPackage.) And if you later decide to change one of those values, you can just get another PLK.