It's been an interesting journey, these last 3 ½ years. I was hired at Microsoft, after an internship the summer before my senior year, to work on a long-lead effort creating new IDE components and developer tools. On my first day back, my boss...

Every couple of weeks, I'll get a question about getting an arbitrary file on disk into a project in VS without asking VS to open in a document window directly. It seems to be pretty hard to find information for (when I needed to do it, it took a few...

Tagging along with the last editor fundamentals post on the pull/event model , today's article is the application of that model to handling text-relative adornments. The adornment "manager" Within the editor, we use a fairly common pattern for...

I pushed an update (v2.22) to the Spell Checker extension just a little bit ago which fixes a pretty major and annoying performance issue with large C# files. I say "fixes", but it's really just a big work around, courtesy Michael (who will post an entry...

(This is part of the Q&A Series ) This question comes from Cameron Peters, from the previous Q&A on read-only regions : How expensive, relatively is it to call Snapshot.GetText? I have a classifier/tagger that works well with small...

(This is a new series I plan to write in occasionally, where I'll talk more generally about some of the design fundamentals of the editor and best practices for extensions) One of the things I learned early on, probably incorrectly, is that you can...

Sorry for (another) long hiatus, again. I've been pretty busy, the last few weeks especially, working on fixing bugs and some interesting internal projects that may make their way to the public eye soon-ish (like in the next few months soon-ish, which...

This question was asked recently on the (internal) editor discussion alias: Is it at all possible to make parts of the text buffer read-only? Could I, for example, mark certain spans as not modifiable, so that the user wouldn't be able to change...

If you'd ever taken a peek at the code for the Spell Checker extension before a couple weeks ago, you may have noticed that there were some definition interfaces intermingled with the various implementation classes. One such example is the NaturalTextTag...

Been a long time since I've blogged, sorry about that. I won't get too deep into things that have happened since my last post, but here's the short list: Visual Studio 2010 shipped Yeah, the obvious one. We (individual developers) actually aren...

One of the new features for the editor in Visual Studio 2010 is zoom, which is one of those nice things we get for free by using WPF. If you haven't played with it yet, there are two ways to zoom in an editor instance: the zoom control in the bottom margin...

Paul Harrington just posted an interesting article on the Visual Studio blog entitled "Marshal.ReleaseComObject Considered Dangerous" . I don't have anything more technically useful to add, but I want to share my take on this. The article was especially...

Download Align Assignments on the VS Gallery , and check out the source on github . About a month ago, a blog article about "TextMate shortcuts you should be using" came across my feed reader. The third item down on that list is "Align Assignments...

While browsing StackOverflow for questions about VS2010 , I came upon a question about how to make .less files open in the CSS editor . Coincidentally, I had written up an extension to do this in response to a tweet from about a month ago. Since the popularity...

I've made a couple of small fixes in various extensions since the RC. Things have been busy, still, so I haven't had a chance to get back to my normal blogging schedule, but I have had small bits of time for the following: Go To Definition ...

Over the weekend, I came upon a question on StackOverflow about how, in the new editor, you can't override the foreground color of selected text. I had actually played around with writing an extension to "fix" this awhile back, but never really got it...

This is part of the "Markdown mode" series : Part 3.5 - Posted on the VS Gallery Part 3 - A live tool window previewer Part 2 - Writing a classifier Part 1 - Markdown! A few nights ago, around midnight, I was in that I'm-pretty-tired...

Welcome to the Visual Studio 2010 RC! This post is for everyone updating an extension from Beta 2, though it may have some points of interest for people who want to write a new extension against the RC (and the final, shipping version of Visual Studio...

Just FYI for anybody that has visited the Visual Studio Gallery (very) recently: All extensions have been unpublished in preparation for the RC coming out (there will be some incompatibilities, so the gallery automatically unpublishes between pre...

Here's a question for everyone: Since switching over to using Markdown for writing my blog, I've been pretty happy with the overall workflow: I use an existing post as a template, often the source for my general page on all my extensions...

I've had a really busy week this week (I'll hopefully be able to share more about that in the near future), so apologies that I missed my post on Monday. I'm also about to head out for a little mini-vacation tomorrow afternoon, but I decided to sneak...

Download Spellcheck on the VS Gallery . Get the source on github . As I wrote about in my series on Markdown Mode , one of the features I've missed from vim and many other IDEs is spell check, both in normal code comments (from when I used Eclipse...

This is part of the "Markdown mode" series : Part 3 - A live tool window previewer Part 2 - Writing a classifier Part 1 - Markdown! I'm in a jolly mood, having just bought a new sofa and chair at IKEA and getting rid of my old one (it...

I took a little break from the Markdown work to fix a few bugs and annoyances in my other extensions. Go To Definition Go To Definition on github . Updated Go To Definition on VSGallery . There were two known issues with this one. The...

This is part of the "Markdown mode" series : Part 2 - Writing a classifier Part 1 - Markdown! Well, this part ended up being both easier and considerably harder than I expected, depending on how you look at it. First, the obligatory...