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72

answers:

2

I want to develop an extension for VS2010 that will allow me make some additional features to syntax-highlighting.

I installed the SDK, how do I start from?

Please give a little snippet (or a link to code) where I can see how to start.

Note: do I have to check the whole block of code, or the SDK tells me on each word what it is, how it's declared etc.?

+1  A: 

You might check out

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ookLanguage

which has a syntax highlighter in "OokTokenTag.cs" in the C# sample. You do have to parse a whole block of text, of course, but this is not too hard.

(Found that link from http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsx/thread/657212c1-1685-4ed6-be2f-cbf34fcc5b20 )

Brian
But this only talks about individual words, I wanna find out if a word is a class, enum, private etc.
Shimmy
+3  A: 

There's a decent bit of information out there for writing classifiers. I wrote a blog article about it awhile back.

As for samples/code, there's:

The answer to the other part of your question about if the SDK tells you what each word is, the answer is "no", with a few "kinda" caveats. In general, the underlying language models are not exposed, though you can do things like consume the classification information from other classifiers in the hope that they give you enough information; some, like C#, tend to give a good deal of information that may not show up in the IDE in the default fonts and colors settings (check the Tools->Options->Environment->Fonts and Colors settings to see if you want to change may already be there), and others, like VB, tend not to. You can also use things like DTE's CodeModel, but I've never heard of someone having really good experiences with it.

If you want an example of consuming classification information, you can see how this CommentTextTagger.cs (part of a spellchecker extension) does it.

Noah Richards
Actually, that's exactly what I wanna do; I want to make the highlighting in VB for classes, enums, structures, methods, namespaces just like C# does (partially) and make local variables bold, static variables italic etc. etc.
Shimmy
Also, I want to improve the existing VB/C# intellisense so it has a filter like Karl Shifflett did in the XAML intellisense.
Shimmy