Visual Studio Editor Blog : TechEd

Walkthrough: Getting Started with Editor Extensions

VSEditor — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:11:00 GMT

In an attempt to bring extension building to the masses, the editor team submitted a hands on lab for TechEd this year that walks you through creating a real-world extension. While one of the goals of the lab is to show you how to build extensions in general, the hope was to also disseminate some of the methodologies and concepts behind our new extensibility story.

Everyone has certainly seen the obligatory “Hello World” code for any new thing they try. I wanted the lab to be much more meaningful than that though, and instead provide you with a scenario that might be something you actually want to do. In this case, what you’re building is an extension that allows you to place walkthrough content directly inside of the editor in little chat-like bubbles.

All of the walkthrough steps you see here are actually parsed from an XML file, which means that this extension adds meta content to the editor window without any modification of the code file it is displaying. Moreover, there is also another kind of visual created here; a little block around the word “System,” which when hovered over will then display a tooltip with extra information. These two visuals are called “Adornments” in the editor world, and are nothing more than Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) elements associated to a grouping of text. Last but not least, the green bar across the top of the image above (that has a label with “Position:” on it) is called a margin. This is another WPF element, but this time it is snapped to the outside edge of the editor’s window.

So if you didn’t get a chance to make it to TechEd 2009, but would like to try out the lab, you’re in luck. It takes about an hour to complete (yes, you will be able to get all of that functionality done in an hour) and it takes the time to explain a bit about what you’re doing and why. I hope you find it useful, and look forward to the extensions you guys create!

Download Lab Files

Cheers,

Chris Granger
Program Manager | Visual Studio Platform

Welcome to the new VS10 Editor!

VSEditor — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:50:00 GMT

Hi,

As Sean mentioned below, the new VS10 Editor was unveiled at TechEd EMEA this week. We are all excited to introduce the new VS10 Editor to the world! The VS10 Editor was designed with extensibility from the ground up, and we want to enable our customers to build cool extensions on top of our platform. You can view the Jason Zander TechEd EMEA session at http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/developer/default.aspx

Soma has a Channel9 session on the key themes for VS2010, and demos how the VS10 Editor allows for text view margin extensibility by showing off our Structure Margin sample at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Soma-on-the-Key-Themes-for-Visual-Studio-2010/

Welcome to the new VS10 Editor!

Fiona Fung

Lead Software Design Engineer

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