Visual Studio Editor Blog : MEF

Code Samples, Documentation, and… Twitter!

VSEditor — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:40:00 GMT

Samples

In an effort to help more people get started with Editor extensibility quickly and easily, we’ve recently posted some new code samples on the VS 2010 Editor. Each of the links below will take you to a sample, complete with description, instructions, and a download of all the code you need.

ToDo Glyphs: Adds a visual glyph for ToDo items in a file
Hyperlink: Enables Ctrl+click navigation to hyperlinks
Diff Classifier: Provides syntax highlighting for diff/patch files
Highlight Word: Uses tagging and adornments to highlight all occurrences of the word under the caret
Caret Fish Eye: Transforms the text in the editor so it appears larger around your caret and smaller elsewhere

There’s also source code available for the RegEx Editor, Demo Dashboard, IntelliSense Presenter, and Image Insertion extensions, as seen on the Visual Studio Gallery and in the Extension Manager, so you can see how we implemented them :-) You can find all of these and a variety of samples from other teams at the VSX sample homepage – check back periodically because we’ll continue to add new content from now to the final release of VS 2010.

Documentation

We’ve also heard some feedback that you want more documentation, so here it is: Beta1 Editor documentation. You’ll find walkthroughs on extensibility, help with MEF, a list of extension points, and more. It’s a great place to get started.

Twitter

You can always get in touch with the Editor team by commenting on this blog, posting in our Beta1 feedback forums, or e-mailing us directly. Now there’s one more way to get Editor news and keep in touch with the Editor team: follow @vseditor on Twitter! We’re new to Twitter but are already tweeting about new samples, documentation, news, and all things Editor, so check us out!

Brittany Behrens
Program Manager, VS Platform Team

Editor Evolution

VSEditor — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:43:00 GMT

The new editor is featured in the cover story for the April issue of Visual Studio Magazine! The magazine publishes news and information for professional developers, and this month it is spotlighting Visual Studio 2010 in an article called “IDE Evolution”. Here are a few highlights:

“In VS 2010, developers can experience firsthand the beginning of the IDE's evolution: improved code navigation, annotation and extensibility with the WPF-based shell; better performance and scalability for native code; and fundamental improvements in debugging and test-driven development.”

“What we want is flexibility and extensibility. For instance, it's because the new editor is WPF-based that we can, for reasonable engineering cost, offer the ability to add inline adornments, margins, even 'heads up display' style extensions. ... The best part is you won't have to wait for us to do these things -- you want profiler information overlaid on your text? No problem. Go do it. Test coverage? Hot links to documentation? Online presence indicators based on e-mail names in comments? You could do all these things.”

The article gives a great overview not only of the new editor but also of Visual Studio 2010 as a whole, including the new shell, extension manager, Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), and new features for the Team System (VSTS) editions. If you’re interested in hearing the latest buzz about VS 2010, I’d encourage you to read the article, available free online here.

Brittany Behrens
Program Manager, VS Platform Team

A New Editor for Visual Studio

VSEditor — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:10:00 GMT

Today at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona Spain, Jason Zander demonstrated a ton of new features that are part of the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4.0 release. One of the key features that was well received by the audience was the New Editor for Visual Studio. In his demo, Jason showed how the New Editor built on top of Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) enables developers to extend the editor by showing several fun editor extensions.

The first editor extension shown was actually provided by one of our VSIP Partners, DevExpress. They've been working with the Visual Studio 2010 CTP over the last few weeks to provide a custom comment & image viewer inside of the Editor which demo was used to display a sequence diagram inside the code file.

The next sample extension was the "Method History Pop-up". It made use of Adornments to color code each line depending on the last developer who had touched the line and used WPF to provide a graphical animated representation of the code churn over time.

One common request that I get is for the ability to view the history of a file. With the "Micro-V" extension, Jason showed a slider at the top of the editor which switched on a historical mode that allowed him to go back and view the editing history of the file with an inline diff.

The document map margin provides an zoomed out view of the code editor which allows users to quickly navigate to important landmarks in their code. This extension to the editor demonstrated extensible margins which allow developers to add views to the side or above & below the editor.

Jason also invoked up an XML Comment Adornment which replaced existing XML comments with a much easier to read view over the comments. This was yet another example of how adornments to the code can change the way developers read & modify their code.

If you're curious about the New Editor in Visual Studio or you want to try to write your own extensions, I'd recommend downloading the "Visual Studio 2010 CTP here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=922B4655-93D0-4476-BDA4-94CF5F8D4814

Sean Laberee

Lead Program Manager

VS Platform Team