Marketing Ninja

Props to Korayem for Stumbling the AddOn Studio for WoW.

It’s not often that I get to mention WoW in the subjects that I blog about on AjaxNinja, but this article practically wrote itself the moment I saw the AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft on CodePlex.

What is an addon for World of Warcraft?

If you haven’t heard of Blizzard’s smash-hit MMORPG World of Warcraft, then you’ve probably been living in a cave for the past several years. There are World of Warcraft commercials featuring William Shatner and Mr. T all over television and not to mention an entire Southpark episode ("Make Love, Not Warcraft") dedicated to the game. WoW is one of the most popular video games on Earth, and by far the most popular MMO on the market.

The World of Warcraft API is a set of functions, provided by Blizzard, that allow you to interact and modify the World of Warcraft game through the use of addons and macros. (WoWWiki)

Users develop macros and addons to automate monotonous tasks, customize the heads-up-displays, or to add additional functionality that isn’t included in the default game. I use TitanPanel to help provide me with in-game coordinates and Auctioneer to help me data-mine all of the auction houses in order to determine what the most appropriate rates for selling items to other players.

What is AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft?

AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft is an extension for Visual Studio 2008 (requires .NET 3.5) and it was developed by the Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Team. It offers a number of standard Visual Studio features for WoW AddOn development, such as:

• Visual Design Surface
• Lua Code Editor
• FrameXML IntelliSense
• Auto-Generate Table of Contents
• Auto-Generate Lua Events

As a long-time Visual Studio user I can tell you that IntelliSense and the Visual Design Surface are invaluable production tools; the drag and drop features of the VDS expedite GUI design significantly and IntelliSense saves developers on a  look of "look-up time," time you’d normally use to look up function names and parameter lists in a reference guide if you didn’t have IntelliSense.

In short, AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft brings all of the power of Visual Studio to WOW developers.

Why is this Good for Visual Studio and World of Warcraft?

AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft is good for WoW players obvious reasons; anyone who’s interested in making his or her own addon for World of Warcraft now has an intuitive, free tool for developing addons. Free? That’s right, AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft works for any of the Visual Studio Express 2008 editions, which are free editions of Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDEs. To clarify, this Visual Studio Extension will not work with Visual Studio 2005.

In short, WOW players who didn’t want to develop WOW addons due to the complexity of them now have a tool that makes the process much simpler, so ultimately there may be more addons, which means a better playing experience for a lot of WOW Players.

Now, the benefits for Microsoft and MSDN are much more interesting; by giving WOW addon developers access to a powerful, free tool, Microsoft can potentially attract a number of passionate developers (which any addon developer is) to Microsoft’s tool set, and eventually the .NET framework. In a sense, Microsoft can essentially establish some "Microsoft Brand Loyalty" among WOW players as a result of this contribution to the WOW community.

Maybe I’ll develop an addon, but I had probably ought to level my rogue to 70 first!

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