SharpDevelop

 I hope you will be excited about this as much as I am. The Code Completion in SharpDevelop 4 just got two big enhancements: 1. You can now search by substring or CamelCase (ReSharper-like):      2. Notice that we did not import System.IO. Look ... [More] what happens when we select "FileStream":   If you have always been annoyed by having to spell class name without Code completion and then adding the using manually every time you were missing it, this is now over. This also works for Extension methods, but you have to press Ctrl+Space to see all available extension methods. We decided to use Ctrl+Space because always showing all extension methods could be confusing. Notice that we are not importing System.Linq: After typing '(', the using is again added automatically: Happy coding Martin [Less]

After writing about the HelpViewer addin, it is about time to introduce the new help system. How does it work? The Help Library Agent is a locally running application, responding to a new protocol called "ms-xhelp". It is not really a protocol like ... [More] "http" - you cannot use it in a browser directly (technically, you could, but there is a security warning). You have to access the agent to transform the ms-xhelp:// call into an http:// call if you want to use the output in your own controls. How to get the new help system? And how to install it? Just install the Windows SDK 7.1 for example. After the install finishes, the Help Library Manager will show up automatically. If your local content folder is not initialized, it will ask for it: After that, you can select different help catalogs from an online source Select the catalogs you want to download, and hit the Update button. The download will commence and once done, the new help system is ready. Note that sometimes this might not work and the manager application crashes with an exception. Please refer to the event log of your system. It is probably the background download service. One work-around is to login as the Administrator and to repeat the process. This would work but it is not recommended. The better way is to download the content with another tool called Visual Studio 2010 Help Downloader: Select the catalogs again and start the download. If you are ready, start the manager application again and choose "Install content from disc". Go to the download folder and select the .MSHA file You will now see the downloaded catalogs, and you can install them without any other problems. [Less]

I just checked in an update for the HelpViewer addin. It has a new pad displaying the contents of your selected help catalog. It was written by Sebastian Ullrich, a German developer. He provided me with the classes and pieces for SharpDevelop. So ... [More] just let me thank Sebastian for his great work and for sharing it with the community and the users under public domain. Thank you! [Less]

I checked in my HelpViewer addin today. It gives you a basic control over the new Microsoft Help System. This system was introduced with Visual Studio 2010 and it is probably the only product using it at this time. The new help addin is going to ... [More] replace the Help 2.0 addin, I wrote a few years ago. But it will not work if the help system is not installed and initialized. Please keep that in mind. So, what's new? There are no familiar pads like the table of contents, index or search. "not yet", I might add. The addin just provides a simple options dialog You can select the catalog, you want to use (if you have more than one) and you can switch between local help (offline) and online help. If you are in the editor and you need help with something, for example the OpenBaseKey method here, just press F1. In offline help mode, the HelpViewer addin tries to find the related topic in the selected catalog. If you see nothing try a different catalog. In online help mode, the addin uses Microsoft's Developer Network (MSDN) That's it. Please let me know if you catch an error or something strange. [Less]

I am participating in Google Summer of Code again this year and I am working on VB .NET support for SharpDevelop. In the .NET world VB .NET is one of the most used languages. SharpDevelop has only support for VB 2005. With VB 2008 and 2010 Microsoft ... [More] has introduced a lot of new features previously only available in C#. In comparison to its C# support, SharpDevelop's VB .NET support is rather poor, but VB has a bigger userbase than C#. VB .NET is especially interesting to people with little programming experience, because it is easy to use and easy to learn. Combining this with powerful tools available in an Open Source IDE like SharpDevelop makes it even better. What I plan to do code completion "when you type" code snippets refactorings and code generators block statement highlighting improved syntax highlighting What I am working on Currently I am working on getting the foundations for all these features ready. Basically I am adapting the parser and code completion engine to the new VB syntax constructs. After this is done I will start working on better code completion support. Martin is working on ReSharper features for SharpDevelop. I will be closely working together with him this year, to make all features available to VB .NET users too. A first preview of the block statement highlighting: All block starts and ends will be highlighted when moving the caret on the end or start tag. It is not finished yet, because there are still bugs and modifiers are not yet highlighted. Please give feedback on my work, because your feedback helps to make it even better. You can try the VB .NET features here. (Take a look at the VB .NET branch.) If you ever missed any feature (in Visual Studio or elsewhere), please comment this blogpost. If it is good, I will implement it. [Less]

Hi all, My name is Kumar Devvrat and I will be working on the WPF Designer as part of this year's Google summer of code (GSoC) project. WPF is used extensively to design UI's and a good designer for that exponentially eases the whole ... [More] design/development process. Firstly, I would like to give insight into some of the features that the current WPF Designer is lacking by comparing it to Microsoft Visual Studio Designer for WPF "Cider" so that it would give a better idea of the features that will be implemented. 1. General purpose adorners The Designer lacks some adorners for controls such as margin handle, margin stub, in-place editor, size display. Short-cuts are not there for quick operations in the Designer.    2. WPF Resources, Styles and Templates   Any Styles or Control Templates applied to any XAML element will thereby be visible in the designer also. Also editing them through their specific editors will be there as a new feature. The screenshot below is of some common controls themed by a ResourceDictionary. Notice that controls in #develop designer have their default template.   3. Preview in Outline Hovering mouse in the outline pad while editing a XAML file brings up a small preview next to it showing a screenshot of the child controls of the control hovered on. This is quite a good feature while playing around with large XAML files. These are some of the features that I will be implementing these summers. Apart from these, I will also be working on the following PropertyGrid improvements such as collection editor, "Browse Image..." dialog for properties like Image.Source Editing attached properties Context Menu having common and specific editing features in the designer Specific editing for Layout panels : StackPanel, DockPanel, Canvas - reordering controls through drag 'n' drop and changing attached property (eg: DockPanel.Dock)    In-place editing for some common controls : Menu, Toolbar About me  My name is Kumar Devvrat and I am 19 years old. I am currently an undergraduate in Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India and majoring in Mechanical Engineering. I admire .NET very much and love coding in C# and python. I am also a Linux enthusiast and avid supporter of FOSS.  I am very much excited to be a part of SharpDevelop community. I hope I meet all your expectations. In case you feel like suggesting new features or addition/changes to the above, please feel free to comment. Cheers, -- Devvrat     [Less]

House-keeping first: source code can be found in the /Reports branch (a branch of version 4.0 of SharpDevelop), an integration build is available on the build server under the heading "Mirador Reports Branch". Back to the scheduled programming - in ... [More] the near future I will work on the following tasks: The Exporter It is used by the ReportViewer as well as for creating PDFs (et cetera) - and it will be rewritten. The reason for this is: For each BaseReportItem I have to maintain 3 classes. First the Base…Item in Reports.Core, then, one in Reports.Addin to use in the Designer and third I have to convert the BaseReportItem in a new class derived from BaseExportColumn. I will remove the third part and use only classes derived from BaseReportItem. This will bring me to a codebase that is used in the standard printroutine as well. Advantages: Less code to support Same codebase as in the standard printing (preview) Less conversation So, to make things easy I will rewrite the Exporter. Sub Reports Next, I will start working on subreports to support grouping. This will touch the ReportWizard, the Designer and the DataManager. I will use the already existing TableLayout as a base for SubReports. [Less]

Hi, because I am new to SharpDevelop. I would like to introduce myself. My name is Tomáš Linhart and I am 21 years old. I currently study Software Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague - Faculty of Electrical Engineering. I love ... [More] programming under .NET and I also love Java and Ruby. I will be working this summer on Code Quality Analysis for SharpDevelop. This tool should help developers to find the weakness of their code. They can use it to keep low coupling. Find dead or unused code. Find code with high cyclomatic complexity and so on. The first feature is dependency graph. You can highlight specific dependencies. You can move with nodes.   You can try it yourself. Compiled version is available in the Download section. This is early version so I recommended you to download source and build it.   I plan to develop these features during summer: Dependency Graph Dependency Matrix Kiviat Metrics Graph Treemap Metric Dozens of code metrics (Cyclomatic complexity, Percentage of comments and so on) Query code (LINQ and simple query language) Reports to HTML If you have any wishes for features which would you like to have. Please write a comment about it. Cheers! Tomáš [Less]

The code for UDC (collector & analysis) is located at the following Subversion repository URL: svn://svn.sharpdevelop.net/sharpdevelop/trunk/SharpDevelopServers/UsageDataCollector The solution for the collector can be found in the /Project ... [More] folder, appropriately named UsageDataCollector.sln. The structure of this solution looks like this: Please note that under Reference Projects, there is a project reference to UsageDataCollector which actually lives inside the SharpDevelop client project structure. Therefore we recommend you check out the entire trunk when working with UDC. Projects explained: CollectorServiceHost: a Web application that hosts service implementations from CollectorServiceLibrary. Really a thin wrapper only. CollectorServiceLibrary: the "meat of UDC" so to speak. It contains service implementations (message upload), import functions, msbuild tasks (wrapping the import functions) as well as some utility classes. CollectoryLibrary.Tests: way too few tests. CollectorServiceTestClient: a sample client that shows how client & server talk with each other. BulkImport: a command line client to import UDC messages. It is already superseded by the msbuild tasks because those are easier to extend. ImportWindowsService: a placeholder for a Windows service that automatically loads messages on arrival. DataAccess: all EF magic ist placed here. QuickViewer: a simple drag & drop viewer for UDC messages. A helper utility for various stages of development. I skipped over the ExcelReport project for one reason: it was the initial PoC for data analysis (exceptions). The code is now part of the Web frontend we are building - but more on the analysis Web application in a later blog post. [Less]

 I hope you will be excited about this as much as I am. The Code Completion in SharpDevelop 4 just got two big enhancements: 1. You can now search by substring or CamelCase (ReSharper-like):      2. Notice that we did not import System.IO. Look ... [More] what happens when we select "FileStream":   If you have always been annoyed by having to spell class name without Code completion and then adding the using manually every time you were missing it, this is now over. This also works for Extension methods, but you have to press Ctrl+Space to see all available extension methods. We decided to use Ctrl+Space because always showing all extension methods could be confusing. Notice that we are not importing System.Linq: After typing '(', the using is again added automatically: Happy coding Martin [Less]