During the development of our Blueprints we can sometimes use a little extra help to understand what is really going on. It turns out that if we add a Registry setting called ‘EnableDeveloperFeatures’ under the ‘HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Blueprints’ key and set its value to ‘true’ we get a few extra features enabled in the Blueprint Manager that might help understand (debugging) Blueprints . In the screenshot below we can see the checkboxes that become visible after we have added the ‘EnableDeveloperFeatures’ setting to the Registry. The checkboxes are read only in the Blueprint Manager dialog but can be set through the Registry.

As we can see, the ‘Custom Menu Filter’ checkbox is checked which means custom menu filters are enabled by default for our Blueprints. We can disable this feature by adding a ‘DisableCustomMenuFilters’ setting under the ‘HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Blueprints’ key and set its value to ‘false’.

To enable logging in the Blueprint Manager we can add the ‘BPMLogging’ setting to the Registry and set its value to ‘true’.

In an earlier post I demonstrated how to create a custom menu filter. After adding a ‘MenuDebugging’ setting to the Registry and set its value to ‘true’ we can see that Blueprint Manager now logs (output window) that it actually detects the custom menu filter that we created and also determines if it should be visible or not.

Hopefully, enabling these features help a little during the development of your Blueprints…