WebEdit.NET Languages Configuration

Saturday, March 5, 2005

Editor support for programming languages includes various things, such as syntax coloring, auto-completion, editing conversions, and so on. I have consolidated these things a bit, aiming at extensibility, configurability, and general mix-N-match support. The new Gregor.Core.CLanguageInfo class serves as the root for various configurable things, such as syntax parsers, token lists, editing converters, and more.

I've made two changes to the WebEditLanguages.xml and WebEditTemplates.xml files in the process:

1. The "type" attribute in the language elements must name Gregor.Core.CLanguageInfo instead of Gregor.WebEdit.Editing.CLanguageInfo.
2. All relative paths ("relpath" attributes) are now based on the installation folder, not the effective configuration folder (AppConfig or a sub folder).

The latter is actually a plus: it easies copying configuration files between the config and profile folders, or from global to per-user configuration.

One the bright side, WebEdit.NET now supports alias substituion in AutoText, which is similiar to the Code Snippet feature found in commercial IDEs. For details, see the Configuration and Token Expansion topics in the Docs.