Viasfora - Your new favorite Visual Studio Text/*ML Editing Extension?

Winterdom - Introducing Viasfora

A couple of days ago, I unveiled Viasfora, my latest attempt at building a decently packaged extension for Visual Studio 2010, 2012, and 2013. I had already published a few VS Extensions before (Keyword Classifier, BetterXml, Line Adornments, and Xaml Classifier Fix), but it was not overly successful. The reasons for this were several:

What is Viasfora?

Viasfora is a combination of my 3 most significant previous extensions. Keyword Classifier, BetterXml and Line Adornments. It puts them all in a single, nice package that includes full customizability through the Tools -> Options dialog in Visual Studio, including the ability to turn individual features on/off.

So what does Viasfora offer? Check the website for the full details, but here are some highlights:

• Current Line Highlighting, a native feature in VS2013, but supported on VS2010 and VS2012.
• Custom highlighting of Control Flow keywords, LINQ-related Keywords and Visibility keywords for C#, C/C++, JavaScript and Visual Basic (new!).
• Highlighting of character escape sequences in C# strings, which makes it real easy to spot them!
• Custom highlighting of XML namespace prefixes in XML/XAML/HTML documents.
• Highlighting closing element tags in XML/XAML/HTML documents in a different color as the opening element tag. This is one of my favorite features and one I often miss from Vim.
• Matching (through highlight) of opening/closing element tags in XML documents (new!).
• Tooltips for easy lookup of XML namespace prefixes.

Hopefully having a nice (if simple) website for the extension with all the information makes it easier for people to find and get interested in it. As with my previous extensions, complete source is available on the https://github.com/tomasr/viasfora/ repository.

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Viasfora v1.1 Published

Tonight I pushed a new version of my Viasfora extension for Visual Studio. In this version, I fixed some features that were not working on Visual Studio 2013 due to the introduction of a new HTML editor, particularly highlighting closing HTML tags.

What’s exiting to me, however, is the new feature: Rainbow Parentheses:

This is a Visual Studio version inspired by one of my favorite Vim plugins. Features:

• Supported for C#, C/C++ and JavaScript files.
• Highlights {}, [] and () braces.
• Supports 4 different nesting levels, format for each one can be customized through the Tools -> Options dialog (Rainbow Parentheses 1-4).

Viasfora

A Visual Studio 2010, 2012, and 2013 extension that adds miscellaneous (but useful!) enhancements to the VS text editing experience.

Just caught this today and I think the new Rainbow Parentheses is worth the price (well, it's free and open source, but you get the idea)...