I am not looking to do anything fancy just create a bucket for our internal company Visual Studio projects etc.
I have been through the following resources and it seems the codeplex projects have the same behavior as my tutorial walk throughs which tells me I don't understand / know what to look for / learn exactly.
Said behavior is that when my code or the codeplex code compiles and runs with no issues but I don't see the new language show up??? By show up I am expecting to see it in the New Project dialog under templates.
I started here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb165744.aspx
and though not the best tutorial I feel I got everything correct. It compiles and runs but my new "Language" doesn't show.
So I did some more searching perhaps another tutorial might fill in some gaps I missed and I watched this video for an hour.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/VSIPMarketing/VSX212-Adding-a-Language-Service-into-Visual-Studio-2010
It's for 2010 but felt 2013 and 2010 close enough that it might help....and while I did learn quite a bit it didn't give me what I was expecting.
Another Google result was this SO post (How to create a new language for use in Visual Studio) from which I downloaded OOK from codeplex. Updated references, upgraded from 2010 to 2013 etc.
It compiles and runs but again my language is not "showing"....which is the behavior I had in my tutorial guided solution.
So what am I doing wrong??
All I really want is a language bucket where we can put our internal snippets, customized project templates etc. The c# editor, intellisense, syntax highlighting, etc. are just fine so don't need to extend those at this point.
If someone could please point me in the right direction I would be grateful.
Thank You
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As a long-time Visual SourceSafe user (and hater) I was discussing switching to SVN with a colleague; he suggested using Git instead. Since, apparently, it can be used as peer-to-peer without a central server (we are a 3-developer team).
I have not been able to find anything about tools that integrate Git with Visual Studio, though - does such a thing exist?
What are the technologies available for using Git with Visual Studio? And what do I need to know about how they differ before I begin?
In Jan 2013, Microsoft announced that they are adding full Git support into all their ALM products. They have published a plugin for Visual Studio 2012 that adds Git source control integration.
Alternatively, there is a project called Git Extensions that includes add-ins for Visual Studio 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2012, as well as Windows Explorer integration. It's regularly updated and having used it on a couple of projects, I've found it very useful.
Another option is Git Source Control Provider.
I use Git with Visual Studio for my port of Protocol Buffers to C#. I don't use the GUI - I just keep a command line open as well as Visual Studio.
For the most part it's fine - the only problem is when you want to rename a file. Both Git and Visual Studio would rather that they were the one to rename it. I think that renaming it in Visual Studio is the way to go though - just be careful what you do at the Git side afterwards. Although this has been a bit of a pain in the past, I've heard that it actually should be pretty seamless on the Git side, because it can notice that the contents will be mostly the same. (Not entirely the same, usually - you tend to rename a file when you're renaming the class, IME.)
But basically - yes, it works fine. I'm a Git newbie, but I can get it to do everything I need it to. Make sure you have a git ignore file for bin and obj, and *.user.
Git Source Control Provider is new plug-in that integrates Git with Visual Studio.
I've looked into this a bit at work (both with Subversion and Git). Visual Studio actually has a source control integration API to allow you to integrate third-party source control solutions into Visual Studio. However, most folks don't bother with it for a couple of reasons.
The first is that the API pretty much assumes you are using a locked-checkout workflow. There are a lot of hooks in it that are either way expensive to implement, or just flat out make no sense when you are using the more modern edit-merge workflow.
The second (which is related) is that when you are using the edit-merge workflow that both Subversion and Git encourage, you don't really need Visual Studio integration. The main killer thing about SourceSafe's integration with Visual Studio is that you (and the editor) can tell at a glance which files you own, which must be checked out before you can edit, and which you cannot check out even if you want to. Then it can help you do whatever revision-control voodoo you need to do when you want to edit a file. None of that is even part of a typical Git workflow.
When you are using Git (or SVN typically), your revision-control interactions all take place either before your development session, or after it (once you have everything working and tested). At that point it really isn't too much of a pain to use a different tool. You aren't constantly having to switch back and forth.
I find that Git, working on whole trees as it does, benefits less from IDE integration than source control tools that are either file based or follow a checkout-edit-commit pattern. Of course there are instances when it can be nice to click on a button to do some history examination, but I don't miss that very much.
The real must-do is to get your .gitignore file full of the things that shouldn't be in a shared repository. Mine generally contain (amongst other stuff) the following:
*.vcproj.*.user
*.ncb
*.aps
*.suo
but this is heavily C++ biased with little or no use of any class wizard style functionality.
My usage pattern is something like the following.
Code, code, code in Visual Studio.
When happy (sensible intermediate point to commit code, switch to Git, stage changes and review diffs. If anything's obviously wrong switch back to Visual Studio and fix, otherwise commit.
Any merge, branch, rebase or other fancy SCM stuff is easy to do in Git from the command prompt. Visual Studio is normally fairly happy with things changing under it, although it can sometimes need to reload some projects if you've altered the project files significantly.
I find that the usefulness of Git outweighs any minor inconvenience of not having full IDE integration but it is, to some extent, a matter of taste.
Microsoft announced Git for Visual studio 2012 (update 2) recently. I have not played around with it yet, but this video looks promising.
Here is a quick tutorial on how to use Git from Visual Studio 2012.
Also don't miss TortoiseGit...
https://tortoisegit.org/
There's a Visual Studio Tools for Git by Microsoft. It only supports Visual Studio 2012 (update 2) though.
Visual Studio 2013 natively supports Git.
See the official announcement.
The Git support done by Microsoft in Visual Studio is just good enough for basic work (commit/fetch/merge and push). My advice is just to avoid it...
I highly prefer GitExtensions (or in less proportion SourceTree). Because seeing the DAG is for me really important to understand how Git works. And you are a lot more aware of what the other contributors to your project have done!
In Visual Studio, you can't quickly see the diff between files or commit, nor (add to the index) and commit only part of modifications. Browse your history is not good either... All that ending in a painful experience!
And, for example, GitExtensions is bundled with interesting plugins: background fetch, GitFlow,... and now, continuous integration!
For the users of Visual Studio 2015, Git is taking shape if you install the GitHub extension. But an external tool is still better ;-)
TortoiseGit has matured and I recommend it especially if you have used TortoiseSVN.
The newest release of Git Extensions supports Visual Studio 2010 now (along with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005).
I found it to be fairly easy to use with Visual Studio 2008 and the interface seems to be the same in Visual Studio 2010.
The simplest solution that actually works quite well is to add the TortoiseGit commands as external tools.
Solution to adding a Git (TortoiseGit) toolbar to Visual Studio
As mantioned by Jon Rimmer, you can use GitExtensions. GitExtensions does work in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, it also does work in Visual Studio 2010 if you manually copy and config the .Addin file.
Currently there are 2 options for Git Source Control in Visual Studio (2010 and 12):
Git Source Control Provider
Microsoft Git Provider
I have tried both and have found 1st one to be more mature, and has more features. For instance it plays nicely with both tortoise git and git extensions, and even exposed their features.
Note: Whichever extension you use, make sure that you enable it from Tools -> Options -> Source control -> Plugin Selection for it to work.
As of 2013-02-11, the Microsoft Git plugin for Visual Studio 2012 should work with the Express version as well.
I want to write a new templating language, and I want Visual Studio to "support" it. What I need to know is:
How do I parse my new language?
Given some code in my new template language, how do I translate it into HTML? Right now I'm using regular expressions to parse it token by token, but I don't think this is going to scale very well as the language gets more complicated, and there's no error checking. I've heard of ANTLR but never used it. Would that be the right tool for this job, or is there perhaps something simpler? Ideally I'd like to send any syntax errors to the error window with as much information as possible (line #, type of error) like other languages do.
How do I create a new file type for Visual Studio?
How do I get syntax highlighting?
Can I use the same parser I created in step 1, or is this something entirely different?
How do I get Intellisense?
I'd prefer to write my parser in C#.
I would take a look at another language that has already done the legwork of integrating with Visual Studio. A great example is Boo. The language and Visual Studio integration are open source. So you can take a look at exactly what they had to do.
Boo Language: https://github.com/boo/boo-lang
Boo Syntax Highlighting for VS2010 (VSX add-in): http://vs2010boo.codeplex.com/
Boo Language Studio (syntax highlighting for VS2008): http://boolangstudio.codeplex.com/
The Boo Syntax Highlighting for VS2010 includes some recommended links on its homepage, which I'll copy for easy reference:
Nice article about "classification" (syntax highligting) in VS 2010: http://dotneteers.net/blogs/divedeeper/archive/2008/11/04/LearnVSXNowPart38.aspx
Examples for VSX add-ins: http://blogs.msdn.com/vsxteam/archive/2009/06/17/new-editor-samples-for-visual-studio-2010-beta-1.aspx
Regarding the Visual Studio aspects, what you need is a "language service", which is the entity that handles colorizing, intellisense, etc. for a given file extension/type.
For an intro, see this article
And for a code sample see here
Regarding parsing, there are lots of technologies, and I won't offer an opinion/advice.
Beware, there is a fair amount of work involved, although in my opinion it is much more straightforward in VS2010 than in previous versions of Visual Studio to provide this kind of extension.
See also
Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility, MPF and language services
I wrote a VS Language Service using this article as my basis:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/VSLanguageService.aspx
It wasn't too bad if you have a basic handle on Grammars.
There is a sample in the VS SDK that shows most of the features you are looking for.
I was using VS with own language and desperately needed a syntax highlight. I built mine based on this tutorial: https://mattduffield.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/writing-a-brightscript-syntax-highlight-extension-for-visual-studio-2010/
I know the tutorial is in VS2010. I made mine in VS2012 with no or very small hiccups. (also worked in VS2013) Recently I changed to VS2015 and the solution can be edited, built with no problem.
I found this very useful collection of recent samples for Visual Studio 2013 SDK:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsx/archive/2014/05/30/vs-2013-sdk-samples-released.aspx
It also contains the recent version of the OokLanguage which sounds promising.
We used ANTLR 4 to parse our language which works like a charm and allows direct interaction with C# code. Can totally recommend it.
As mentioned in other answers, the most interesting code sample is the Ook language extension for the latest version of Visual Studio (2017 at the time of writing).
For VS 2015 see the sample in the VS2015 branch.
In order to install the SDK for 2015 or later, you need to rerun the VS setup. In 2015 it's called "Visual Studio Extensibility Tools Update 3".
I want to write an AddIn for visual studio (2010). My goal is to add a menuitem to the context menu of all .cs files in the solution explorer. Or maybe just to context menu of the code window, although I prefer the first thing. I've been browsing around on the Visual Studio Extensibility website but I must admit that I'm having a hard time finding a tutorial on how to achieve what I want to. I guess that I don't really understand the VS extensibility model to be honest.
So I thought that some of the smart people here must have tried it before, and I'm hoping to save some time by asking here instead of fumbling in the dark.
Thanks in advance for any help.
I have a blog post on something pretty similar at http://www.runeibsen.dk/?p=237. Unfortunately, it is for VS2008 and AFAIK VS2010 is all WPF based now, in which case you may not be able to use it.
Checkout the codeproject Article-- LineCounterAddin, its a good one. Explaining the VS IDE internals needed to code Addins.
And quick googling shows this one Add-In That Converts C# Code To Visual Basic
I'm looking into Productivity tools for developing in C# / Visual Studio 2008 (pr0) and developing web apps (not using MVC).
Anything from favourite visual studio shortcuts to external tools and plug-ins.
Ctrl+. is one of my favorites. It adds a Using statement for the current class if you don't already have it.
For example if you have this:
Regex
And you hit Ctrl+.. Visual Studio will add
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
to the top of your file.
I also like Code Rush and Refactor Pro from DevExpress.
A very interesting one that was just announced is Telerik's JustCode. It's basically a new refactoring tool (such as Resharper and CodeRush, also very good productivity improvement tools), but also handles Javascript in web projects.
Tools like these can dramatically improve the amount you can get done in a short amount of time.
ANTS Profiler from Red Gate helped our company find a lot of bottlenecks in our C# code.
Reflector from Red Gate PowerCommands visual studio add-in any form of Grep
We've just started using GhostDoc which is pretty useful for quickly generating outlines of comments especially when you're generating your documentation from your XML comments. It's definitely saved me some time.
its not a tool but a big reference chart - you can print it out and hang it on at your work area, to refer quick key bindings http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7162