Generic question about features

Posted 12 years ago by David Rutten - Robert McNeel & Associates

Version: 12.1.0302

Dear all,

apologies if this seems like a lazy question. In our software we are currently using the QWhale source code editors for VB.NET and C# user-defined scripts. I am not happy with some of the quircks of QWhale and less happy still with the pace at which they are being fixed. I heard good things about the actipro code editor controls and I'd like to know whether a short list of features is actually available before I spend a long time trying to shoehorn it into the main product. Can actipro SyntaxEditor:

handle all VB.NET and C# language features of .NET 3.5 upwards? (i.e. Linq, lambda expressions and so on)
handle per-line readonly settings?
handle partial namespaces similar to the VB.NET editor in VS?

I assume the answers to all three are 'yes', but just in case. Do I need extension packs for some of this?

Thank you for your time,

David

Comments (3)

Posted 12 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA

Hi David,

The WPF and Silverlight versions of SyntaxEditor (which share a codebase) are newer than our WinForms version's design and can do a lot more in general. We offer an optional extra .NET Languages Add-on that provides automated IntelliPrompt, code outlining, syntax error reporting, etc. for C# and VB. That add-on is available in all three platforms we have SyntaxEditor on, but again its best implementation is in the WPF/Silverlight versions.

1) The WinForms version of the add-on will parse C# and VB up to and including .NET 4.0 syntax. The WPF/Silverlight versions handle everything including the new .NET 4.5 syntax too. And the WPF/Silverlight versions even have automated IntelliPrompt for LINQ, lambdas, etc. The WinForms version doesn't have automated IntelliPrompt for some of those newer advanced concepts.

2) The WinForms version supports read-only ranges of text. The WPF/Silverlight versions don't have that feature wrapped up in that way yet but they do have a DocumentTextChanging event you can cancel to prevent edits.

3) Could you clarify what you mean by partial namespaces?

Actipro Software Support

Posted 12 years ago by David Rutten - Robert McNeel & Associates

Dear Actipro,

my app will most likely be ported to our Mac application someday soon where it will run on Mono, so WPF is out of the question I'm afraid. Though if it really is a massive difference in quality I may have to reconsider that constraint.

By partial namespaces I mean that if I have an imports statement at the top, say:

Imports System.Drawing

I can then use the Drawing2D namespace in the code without prefixing it with "System.Drawing.":

Dim path As New Drawing2D.GraphicsPath()

My current code-editor does a very bad job at VB.NET features (they seem to care a lot more about their C# parsers), but most of my users are VB people.

Answer - Posted 12 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA

Hi David,

Thanks for letting us know about this. We didn't realize that child namespaces were supposed to be pulled in from Imports. We've updated our WPF, Silverlight, and WinForms versions of the add-on to support this for the next maintenance releases.

Actipro Software Support

The latest build of this product (v24.1.1) was released 3 months ago, which was after the last post in this thread.

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