I'm beginning to work on a COBOL/BASIC IDE at work (to replace the one that we have currently that's a slight step up from Notepad). It'll be made in C#. The management is really interested in implementing some Visual Studio type features, and a big one is code folding. I've looked on MSDN, but I didn't see any good way to collapse lines (or to add the expand/collapse buttons).
I'm assuming that the text area should be a RichTextBox. Am I off track here? I suppose it could be done with some sort of modified TreeView, but that seems a little wrong to me. Is there some way of doing this that I'm just missing?
Why not use an existing IDE and extend it? Writing one from scratch is a huge undertaking (you need a parser, lexer, syntax highlighter and more), and is even more complicated if you need to support multiple languages (you mention COBOL and Basic).
Notepad++ has syntax coloring and one can add languages to it - COBOL is one of the ones installed by default. It supports code folding and has many plugins (you can write your own, that will suit your needs).
Edit:
Eclipse is another excellent IDE that has similar support, and as mentioned in the comments has a COBOL plug-in.
I suggest you take a look at SharpDevelop. It's a pretty good IDE with a bunch of Visual Studio like features already built in. It's written in C# and fully supports code folding with syntax highlighting in several languages. Plus, it's Open Source under the LGPL license. So, if you don't want to base your app on SharpDevelop then you can still reuse some of their controls like the code editor or windowing toolkit.
You should consider adding the COBOL language to SharpDevelop instead of starting from scratch. If you can't do this, then you can still use the SharpDevelop code as a decent reference on how to make a good IDE work.
Sometimes embedding Eclipse or a full-fledged editor is not appropriate. It's overkill or overweight or wrong for some other reason. I appreciate the first inclination suggested in other posts to not re-invent here, but in some cases a small invention is what is necessary. For example, the textbox used to make Stack Overflow posts .... is neither Eclipse nor an embedded Visual Studio. I wonder why?
It's important to ask the question - build it or buy it? - but sometimes, the correct answer is BUILD IT.
XPathVisualizer provides a simple example of a code-folding text editor implemented in C#, and based on a RichTextBox. It's not VB, though - it's an XML editor. But the general principles apply.
Here's a look at it.
To implement XML syntax colorization dynamically, while the user types, it uses a separate background thread. The reasons why and some of the details are described in a separate answer on Stack Overflow.
You could do something similar for your COBOL/VB thing. XPathVisualizer is open source, licensed with MS-PL, so you can browse and borrow.
If your team is used to "Visual Studio features," then I'll assume you use Visual Studio there at the office. Here are my suggestions:
Base your IDE on Visual Studio, for the following reasons:
Use Visual Studio 2010 if possible. The SDK is greatly improved from 2008/earlier.
Use Visual Studio 2008/2005 otherwise. At the moment, all of my commercial IDE products only support 2005/2008.
If your team uses Visual Studio, they will hate Eclipse. Not even an option to consider in this case unless you choose to use an existing Eclipse plug-in, saving you the time of creating a new IDE.
If your team isn't using Visual Studio 2010, you can use the Visual Studio 2010 Shell in Integrated Mode for free (Isolated Mode is not what you want). This lets you use Visual Studio 2010 for your IDE for now, and should the team upgrade later to one of the full versions of Visual Studio 2010, the IDE for your language will cleanly integrate into the full version. Edit: Visual Studio Shell is basically the core of Visual Studio without any specific languages (C#, C++, VB, etc.) included. Microsoft provides this core for free, and it's a great option specifically for people interested in creating their own language support.
Read my answers in the following two questions:
Here's a longer post on my reasons for using 2010 over 2008: How do I implement intellisense support for a custom DLR language in VS2008?
Here's a very long answer on implementing various features (most of which are based on the 2005/2008 SDK): How do i implement intellisense for my language in visual studio?
Writing a complete IDE is a HUGE task. I would recommend trying to find an existing one that has what you want, or make adaptions to an existing open source IDE.
To answer your question: I guess that the Visual Studio IDE uses a custom control, written from scratch, rather than a RichText control.
Related
I've developed a Product which has scripting functionality. I've used the CS Script(C# script) engine to provide this.
I am now looking for a simple and lightweight IDE to ship together with my product. The IDE needs to be very simple and plain for my customers. Ideally it should look something like Notepad++ but has auto-completion feature.
NOTEPAD++
I know some people may suggest Notepad++ with which has an auto-completion plugin. However,the problem with Notepad++ is that it is VERY COMMON in most of my customers machine, therefore I may not be able to override the installation with my Customized Notepad++ files.
VISUAL STUDIO EXPRESS
Visual Studio Express has been suggested in another topic, however, Visual Studio Express is NOT light weight. I want something easy and portable.
Does roslyn or visual studio 2015 provide API to rewrite IL or "something like that"? Let me explain...
I've read in msdn magazine's article Use Roslyn to Write a Live Code Analyzer, that it is possible to write custom code analyzers distributed via nuget packages, without need for visual studio plugins.
I'm really curious, if roslyn compiler and visual studio 2015 will allow to implement e.g. Code Cotracts such way, that no plugin is required to build it correctly.
Also, I would like to gain productivity and readability of my code with aspects like [NotifyPropertyChanged] data annotation on properties, but again, if it won't build correctly on every machine with visual studio 2015, it's not a good idea.
It is possible to use DispatchProxy from System.Reflection.DispatchProxy package. Unfortunately I haven't found any examples how to use it, but it looks like a replacement for RealProxy class with some differences (examples how to use RealProxy: hear and here).
ide: vs 2012 v11.0.60610.01 update 3
project: web site, mix of vb and c#
problem: vb navigates to definition, c# navigates to metadata
complaint: complete pain in the ass when managing a 30k code-line project.
solution: you be the first to figure this out, it's beyond my level of patience.
i find metadata to be 110% useless.
is there ANY way to get c# to navigate to the actual definition like vb does?
thanks
If it's navigating to the metadata, rather than the definition, it probably has to do with how your assemblies were added. If you add a reference as a DLL, it will always show metadata, even if that project is included in your solution; you have to add a reference by project to have access to the source.
"i find metadata to be 110% useless. is there ANY way to get c# to navigate to the actual definition like vb does?"
Resharper's go to definition/go to implementation options work exactly as you'd expect - worth trying it to see if it fixes your issue.
This question might be of help if you choose not to try resharper
I realize this is an old thread, but it seemed to be one of the few that focused on the role of mixed languages (C# and VB.NET) as a contributing factor to this.
I ran a few tests across VS.NET 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2015. My empirical results (not validated by any official Microsoft documentation) is that all 4 support Find All References of VB.NET members consumed by C# (albeit, split into apparently separate result groups), as long as project references were added. However, VS.NET 2010, 2012 and 2013 end up in the "from metadata" view for Go To Definition from the C# code to a VB.NET member. Where as VS.NET 2015 appears to have this cross-language Go To Definition navigation working correctly.
I also confirmed that using Resharper's support for External Sources does allow Go To Definition to work under VS.NET 2012, and that almost motivated me to purchase licenses for Resharper for our current project that has mixed C# and VB.NET projects, but now my plan is just to expedite adopting VS.NET 2015.
what is sourcesafe?
i am trying to download it to see if it will work well with c# because someone told me to download it for a job, but i don't even understand what it is?
is it built into the visual studio ide or what?
SourceSafe is a poor and obsolete source control system.
It can store an application's source code and show revision history, and allow multiple developers to work on the same project efficiently.
It has been replaced by Team Foundation Server.
Sourcesafe is a version control system from Microsoft, some would say not a very good one. It's not part of Visual studio however it does integrate into it. MS have now replaced VSS in their Team System version of Visual Studio.
Source control is a great idea, and experience with them will definitely help your Job hunting, but don't constrain yourself to Sourcesafe, also checkout (pun intended) systems like Subversion etc.
In VB.NET projects, errors are highlighted immediately after cursor leaves the line. In C#, I have to wait several seconds for IntelliSense to highlight it. Also, the C# version doesn't show all project errors in "Errors List", unless you start to build it. Actually, it seems to work differently in every way. Is it possible to adjust that behavior?
I am using both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010.
It's because VB.NET does full background compilation whenever the IDE is idle, so it always has the latest information ready. C# doesn't do this and instead have a separate process that creates the IntelliSense information.
You can't really adjust it without a lot of work or buying some third party tool. It's one of the differences between the languages, the VB.NET team concentrates on certain aspects and the C# team on others.
Though I think some of the addins you can buy (possibly ReSharper and others) are advertising better IntelliSense if you really want it.
When using Visual Basic, Visual Studio instantly compiles the new code, whereas with C#, only syntax errors are highlighted directly, and compile errors after you build the code.