I would like to write a syntax highlighting editor extension for VS 2019 in C++ (nothing else), are there any samples to get me started?
I can only find one example extension for VS 2019 written in C++ and it consists of a subclass with no explanations of how to do anything AFAI can see.
I believe I need a language editor extension, but am not 100%
The language it needs to highlight is similar to assembler.
If this was VS6, I might have just used the custom keyword colouriser.
I would like to write a syntax highlighting editor extension for VS
2019 in C++ (nothing else), are there any samples to get me started?
In current VS IDE, Microsoft does not advocate writing extensions in c++.
As Microsoft recommends, current extensions are more likely to use c# rather than c++.
Although some VS SDK APIs are probably written in c++, but the interfaces are still called using c#.
However, there is only one c++ project template called vspakcage
But this project provides various background services for VS IDE . It will only be loaded when needed. So for you to add the syntax highlighting feature permanently, this project is afraid of lacking.
Besides, there is no official documentation to guide the writing of the c++ project.
Suggestion
You can try to write such extension in c#, and you can refer to this official document and this.
In addition, if you still want your feature, I suggest you could suggest a feature on our User Voice Forum.(click suggest a feature). Then you can share the link with us here and anyone who is interested in this feature will vote for you so that it will get Microsoft's attention.
I'm building an application heavily reliant on plugins. These are coded in Lua for easier and faster development.
I now want to add GTK user interfaces for the plugin's configurations. The problem right now is that I need a way to interact with the interface through external code (signals and callbacks basically). And I'm not sure how to implement that behaviour with only an external Lua script.
Is my approach correct or should I instead implement a native solution in my framework for UI?
If you are on linux or BSD, Lua is a perfectly valid choice for GTK. Just take a look to the lua-lgi project. Once installed, you can start building an UI in a matter of seconds:
lgi = require'lgi'
Gtk = lgi.require'Gtk'
dialog = Gtk.MessageDialog { text = 'This is a text message.', buttons = 'CLOSE' }
dialog:show_all()
Gtk.main()
The greatest feature of lgi is that it works for every GObject based library, e.g. cairo, goffice, gnome-db and many more.
If you are on Windows you are out of luck. I have built a working installer but it is more a proof-of-concept than a real project. The road to that has been really tough, expecially because gobject-introspection (widely used by lgi) is not cross-platform friendly yet.
I have no experience on other OS.
Is there any migration analysers available for MonoTouch ?
I have seen one for Mono, but not for MonoTouch.
Short answer: No, there is none at the moment.
Long answer
The situation is a bit different from Mono. In general you test a complete and compiled (against a specific version of the framework) .NET application with MoMA, to get a report of what pieces are missing (or incomplete) in Mono that could affect the execution of your application on other platforms (e.g. OSX and Linux).
Testing a complete applications for MonoTouch would reports tons of issues - since the UI toolkit is totally different. E.g. anything about System.Windows.Forms, WPF... would always missing.
However if your assemblies are already split into (something like) an MVC design it would be possible to test some (the non-UI parts) of them against definitions based on the MonoTouch base class library.
Finally if someone has an immediate need (or looking for a nice project) MoMA is available as open source and the evaluation versions of MonoTouch contains all the assemblies needed to build the definitions files. A bit of extra filtering could make this into a very nice tool.
Alternative
You can see a list of the assemblies that are part of MonoTouch and some platform restrictions (compared to .NET) you should be aware.
This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Any way to use some Scala for iOS coding?
Would it be possible to use the Scala.NET implementation, and then MonoTouch to run Scala code on an iOS device?
I have not been able to find a page with binaries of Scala.NET that I can test, so the following are just general guidelines as to what you can do with MonoTouch and .NET languages.
MonoTouch can run any ECMA CIL that you feed to it. When you consider using a new language with Monotouch, there are two components that come into play:
Tooling for the IDE
Runtime for the language
The tooling for the IDE is the part responsible for starting the builds, providing intellisense and if you use Interface Builder, it creates a set of helper methods and properties to access the various outlets in your UI. As of today, we have only done the full implementation for C#. What this means for an arbitrary language is that you wont get the full integrated experience until someone does the work to integrate other languages.
This is not as bad as it sound, it just means that you need to give up on using XIB files from your language and you probably wont get syntax highlighting and intellisense. But if you are porting code from another language, you probably dont need it. This also means that you would probably have to build your assembly independently and just reference that from your C# project.
So you compile with FoobarCompiler your code into a .dll and then reference in your main C# project.
The language runtime component only matters for languages that generate calls into a set of supporting routines at runtime and those routines are not part of the base class libraries (BCL). C# makes a few of those calls, but they are part of the BCL.
If your compiler generates calls to a supporting runtime that is not part of the BCL, you need to rebuild your compiler runtime using the Mono Mobile Profile. This is required since most runtimes target a desktop edition of the BCL. There are many other API profiles available, like Silverlight, Mono Mobile, Compact Framework and Micro Framework.
Once you have your runtime compiled with our core assemblies, then you are done
If you had read the MonoTouch FAQ, you would have noticed that it currently supports only C# and no other CLR languages.
Binaries for the Scala.NET library and the compiler can be obtained via SVN, in the bin folder of the preview:
svn co http://lampsvn.epfl.ch/svn-repos/scala/scala-experimental/trunk/bootstrap
Bootstrapping has been an important step, and ongoing work will add support for missing features (CLR generics, etc). All that will be done.
For now we're testing Scala.NET on Microsoft implementations only, but we would like our compiler to be useful for as many profiles and runtime implementations as possible.
A survivor's report on using Scala.NET on XNA at http://www.srtsolutions.com/tag/scala
Miguel Garcia
http://lamp.epfl.ch/~magarcia/ScalaNET/
As perhaps you know already, most probably the next version of Delphi will be cross-platform. Also, here are some polls on the matter.
While writing a cross-compiler isn't a thing which interests us very much now, porting a library which was/is Windows-tied to multiple platforms, certainly does.
You can think, for example at VCL (Delphi's standard library). While it was designed for Windows only, it has value in it, and, of course, there are huge codebases which depend on it.
The question is:
Which would be the best approach to made an application / library cross-platform aware ensuring a smooth conversion / upgrade path (as much as possible of course)?
I stress it again, we are not interested which is the best way to do cross-platform development only (there were questions on this theme). We are interested also in yet another requirement: The old code base / installations management.
PS: Experiences and/or methodologies from similar situations with other languages (eg. C/C++) which are regarded as standard practices are welcomed.
Thanks in advance.
Visual component developer's perspective:
Add levels of functionality to your code, so as to be able to add another platform without changing the "Core" of the component.
The compiler hopefully will have a platform switch. (Preferable more than one, working in conjunction with each other. ex. Windows/ARM, Windows/386, OSX/Cacao/386, Linux/Gnome/386).
The Layout structure might look something like this.
ComponentJ.pas
Linux\ComponentJ.pas
Linux\Gnome\ComponentJ.pas
Linux\KDE\ComponentJ.pas
OSX\ComponentJ.pas
386\ComponentJ.pas
ARM\ComponentJ.pas
As an Application Developer:
I'll start by moving all WIN API calls in my code into a group of libraries in a Windows directory as to be able to IFDEF it at library level and translate it into another platform I'd like to support as soon as the compiler becomes available, but only as I come across them.)
This will also add the possibility to add adapters easier for the new platforms.
It in any case is good practice to remove possible dependencies into a central place.
IMHO you can't build a xplatform Delphi and ensure a smooth transition for current VCL applications. It won't work. VCL was (luckily, because it allowed for great applications) designed with Windows in mind, and trying to design a compatible library working on a different platform would just mean longer development cycles and lots of compromises. The outcome will be a library noone would wish to use. Look at what happened to VCL.NET: it was the wrong choice. And it was working on the same OS!
We know that targeting non-Windows platform with native applications needs a native GUI library. We don't care about creating a GUI from scratch, for our application it's the way to go, we don't need Windows GUIs with all their standards under a different OS using different standards - we need to be able to code a fully native GUI for the target OS.
Other applications may survive a GUI porting, but in the long run you don't get a real xplatform tool - you get a tool that may compile for other platforms but brings one platform paradigms to others - and it will also be not welcome by "native" developers on other platforms. If you're a Linux or Mac developer, why should you learn how to work with a library that carries its Windows inheritance to your platform? You'd find it a pain in the ass. If Embarcadero wants to sell XDelphi outside actual developers base, it has to offer much more than a new CLX.
I will pull from some ancient experience in making a code base cross compilable between windows and dos (Delphi 1/Turbo Pascal 7). The rule of thumb was to separate code into multiple units. Try to code WITHOUT using windows, messages or any visual components. If you find you need to make a call to one of these, then place that call in another unit and write a proxy (abstract class that you descend from works well) to dispatch the calls through. When a cross compatible version is released, all that you should have to do is code the other side of the proxy for the new target.
If you're designing a form based system, then try to stick with as many of the standard components as possible. NEVER implement any "business" rules directly in an event, instead place them in another unit and call into the other unit to perform the logic.
Now, there will definitely be changes required to get your final project cross compatible, but by following these simple patterns you should be able to greatly reduce the amount of work it will take.
Experience so far has shown that the best way to get a Delphi app compatible with future versions is to stick to pure Delphi components, and use nothing third party. Such an app will probably suck, but that's how it seems to me. I use lots of third party components, and the apps are great and successful. But the chances of them moving to this future too are not certain, and that may cause problems with such changes, but I'd rather have a great app now and have the problem than have a poor app now and not need to worry about it.
Compromises should not be done too much to make VCL compatible with Linux and Mac. Windows is VCL's root. I'll prefer a new and very clean GUI framework, even though without any backward compatibility. Make VCL fatter and fatter isn't a good idea!
make a cross-platform Pascal compiler
make a cross-platform RTL
put the QT on top
Well, look at freepascal and lazarus
I don't get it. All .NET looks the same to me providing we don't use any third party.
Delphi using standard control is already fully functional but your app would look
like thousands of others.
I think Embar should go for PDA, IPhone, Andriod as Windows desktop already eat about
98% of the market.
Mac is expensive and Linux is no cost at all. No use to go for Mac and Linux. Not worth
the investment.
Well, aside the things said - thanks all - I do think that there we need some additional things:
we need tooling to do the necessary conversions
we need tooling to help us in programming against a (some form of) MVC pattern
Simply pick the latest 4.6 QT and add good integration betwen the Pascal and the QT library.
They have done it before (in the Kylix times). The QT is such powerfull these days.
I believe that QT is even better then VCL and at least 10 times more frequently updated and fixed.
So the plan is simple:
make a cross-platform Pascal compiler
make a cross-platform RTL
put the QT on top
and you will have a first-class natively looking applications on all platforms.
My opinion:
Make cross platform compiler (OS x/Linux/ embedded solutions?/ symbian?). Maybe add ability to compile/convert pascal code into portable c/c++ code to build then on embedded platforms.
RTL have to be separated into cross-platform layer and native layer (as for JCL).
Add new core components for cross-platform compatibility and native components for each supported platform (QT for ex)
Add translation utilities to create/convert between platform's components, for ex: to convert pure windows form into mac os x cocoa's form.
All windows hierarchy of components have to be only upgraded to support x64 with maximum backward compatibility. All cross-platform component have to be in parallel hierarchy.
Next version of cross platform solution can be refactored and can include migration/convertion utility. Due to minimum codebase of cross-platform solutions, hierarchy and classes for cross platform can be heavily changed from version to version to achieve best architecture.
sorry for my English - not a native language (Russian is)!
Make C/C++/Delphi compilers that targets OSX/Linux
Make C/C++ compiler that can be Boosted
Write new VCL-Presentation Foundation (VGScene/WPF alike)
it should not be backward compatibile! Delphi IDE should be
written with such VCL-PF
Component Library should stay as it is (but with improved Data-Binding)
Only provide VCL 64-bit for Win64
Is this a problem?