The Visual Studio 2010 SDK introduced the new class FileExtensionToContentTypeDefinition. This post is all about why I no longer use/export this class, and what I now do instead. The steps in this post only associate specific, known extension(s) with a content type. Further integration into the user-customizable File Types settings and Open With… features requires […]
This post is derived from an email I sent to the NetBeans mailing last month. Some of the implementation details refer to specific items in the NetBeans codebase, but the general algorithms apply to any number of applications. In the past I alluded to spending a great deal of time thinking about ways to improve […]
I’ve been working on Visual Studio 2010 extensibility for some time now, and I must say that creating a tool window was not the easiest task in the world. First Attempt: Create an MEF-friendly IToolWindowService The original goal of this project was creating an MEF service that allowed exporting classes implementing IToolWindowProvider, and have the […]
As some people have noticed, the Visual Studio 2010 SDK doesn’t have great support for the Output Window from MEF extensions. This post aims to change that. Like several other components I’m writing about, I hope to provide this one in a “general extensibility helper” that could be installed separately from extensions that use it […]
I haven’t perfected it yet, but here is a fairly general brace matching tagger that seems to work very well. It relies on the classifier for the content type properly tagging comments and literals with classification types derived from PredefinedClassificationTypeNames.Comment and PredefinedClassificationTypeNames.Literal, which any decent classifier will do. This example really shows a big improvement […]
I’ve been experimenting with Visual Studio’s new extensibility model, and ran into a problem with squiggles. It seems that despite having an internal IQuickInfoSource for the SquiggleTag and IUrlTag, it’s not hooked up to a IIntellisenseController so it never appears. Here is a general implementation for an SquiggleQuickInfoIntellisenseController and UrlQuickInfoIntellisenseController that will provide QuickInfo for […]
By default, brace matching is performed in response to the left and right arrow keys. It should be done in response to several additional commands, as shown below.
This is part 4 of [many?] posts about creating an ANTLR-based language service for Visual Studio. Now that we have an AST with information about the top-level members in our source files, we can use the tree parser to gather this information and make it available for the dropdown bars. For now, the MyC language […]
This is part 3 of [many?] posts about creating an ANTLR-based language service for Visual Studio. Sure a scanner and parser are cool, and syntax highlighting is nice. But the real power in the Visual Studio language services comes in their IntelliSense abilities, and supporting those effectively requires building and processing an AST. In this […]
This is part 2 of [many?] posts about creating an ANTLR-based language service for Visual Studio. Since this is a near-trivial feature to add based on the code in my previous post, I’ll go ahead and get it in tonight. We want to fold from the opening { to the closing } of a function, […]
