This is a utility library to be used with VSIX projects. It abstracts away many of the problem areas of the Visual Studio API into simple to use types.
This project is available as a set of NuGet packages. Which one to choose depends on which version of Visual Studio you are targetting
- EditorUtils: VS 2010 and above
- EditorUtils2012: VS 2012 and above
- EditorUtils2013: VS 2013 and above
If you don't target VS 2010 then use EditorUtils2012 instead of EditorUtils. This avoids some tooling issues in the Visual Studio build around missing references
AppVeyor:
EditorUtils is a collection of abstractions for building VSIX projects. It is broken down into the following feature areas
Syntax highlighting, brace completion, intra text adornments, etc ... are all features provided by the ITagger interface. The interface is simple enough but the rules and scenarios around this interface are complex and largely undocumented. EditorUtils abstracts away much of this complexity by providing a much simpler interface IBasicTaggerSource.
All ITagger implementations are driven through the UI thread of Visual Studio. Any delay in tagger implementations is felt immediately by the user. Simple taggers can afford to be synchronous but more complex taggers must be asynchronous in order to keep the UI responsive. EditorUtils provides the IAsyncTaggerSource<TData, TTag>to abstract away all of the complexities of async tagging.
class MyAsyncTaggerSource : IAsyncTaggerSource<string, TextMarkerTag> { ... }
MyAsyncTaggerSource myAsyncTaggerSource = new MyAsyncTaggerSource();
ITagger<TextMarkerTag> tagger = EditorUtilsFactory.CreateAsyncTaggerRaw(myAsyncTaggerSource);At its core the Visual Studio editor is just a WPF control that is completely independent of Visual Studio itself. The ability to host this control outside of Visual Studio is critical to thorough testing of VSIX plugins. EditorUtils makes this extremely easy to do with the EditorHost feature.
var editorHost = new EditorHost();
var textView = editorHost.CreateTextView();