Comments on: Work-In-Progress: DX_SourceOutliner

By: john rusk

john rusk — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 20:11:36 +0000

[...] [You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.] 5 Responses to UC Berkeley’s …Unhandled Exceptions Blog Archive Work-In-Progress …Comments John Rusk on The Continuing Quest for DEATH of string … Name (required) Mail (will not be [...]

By: sbohlen

sbohlen — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:23:31 +0000

@Eric Williams:

The DXCore VS API abstraction layer from DevExpress upon which I’m builiding the DX_SourceOutliner is (of course) 100% free as is their also-excellent CodeRushXpress offering. I think the DevExpress position in making DXCore free is: “here’s some tooling that makes creating your own VS addins about as dirt-simple as it can be, the community can now easily step up and build whatever they feel is missing”. This releases them from having to worry about building everything anyone might conceivably want.

As for the PowerCommands for Visual Studio add-in, I completely agree and have been a user of that add-in for several years now; the ‘copy as project reference’ option is one of my personal favorites as it allows me to avoid the VS-reference-dialog-waiting-tax that’s the bane of so many MS developer’s existences

Thanks for the comments~!

By: Eric Williams

Eric Williams — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 06:18:41 +0000

I’m somewhat surprised that DX and JetBrains haven’t offered a free VS plugin in this arena. It seems to me that it would be a great “it’s free at first” kind of offering that would hook devs into a full licence of their respective products. I was a Source Code Outliner for a long time until I became a R# user.

Another collection of very useful VS tools are the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/PowerCommands

By: Unhandled Exceptions » Blog Archive » DX_SourceOutliner v0.2 ALPHA Available

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:50:07 +0000

[...] up: for background, refer to this post where I lay out what I’m trying to achieve and this post where I share some of my progress on [...]

By: Unhandled Exceptions » Blog Archive » DX_SourceOutliner v0.1 ALPHA Available

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:58:14 +0000

[...] Comments John Rusk on The Continuing Quest for DEATH of string-literals in my Code…One on Work-In-Progress: DX_SourceOutlinersbohlen on Work-In-Progress: DX_SourceOutlinersbohlen on Work-In-Progress: [...]

By: One

One — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:11:25 +0000

Interesting project. I’ve been using the SC Outliner since I saw you use it and I’m very happy with it.

Refactorings from the outline ???? Hmmm, renaming a method without seeing its body seems unnatural to me. But hey, maybe this solves a problem I didn’t know I had

Could you elaborate a bit on your experiences on developing this DXCore plugin ? Sounds like a nice blog post in the making

One

By: sbohlen

sbohlen — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:19:23 +0000

@Paige Cook:

I had the same thought — to somehow enable the add-in to ‘discover’ if CodeRush + Refactor!Pro were installed.

If they aren’t installed, then you would just get the navigation/filtering capabilies but if they were present in the system, you would get the ‘extra’ capabiliies of invoking the refactoring capabilities directly from the outlined element.

I’m actually uncertain how exactly to enable this b/c I would have to (somehow) decouple the tool window from a hard binary dependency on the CodeRush/Refactor!Pro run-time and yet also somehow invoke the refactorings in them if they are present. Sounds like a job for MEF under VS 2010 if you ask me but I will do some experimenting to see what I can come up with in the next few days — I agree this would be a very elegant way to address the need to have this both run ’stripped down’ when just DXCore is present but run in ’souped-up mode’ when CD + R! are also present.

By: sbohlen

sbohlen — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:14:11 +0000

@Harry S:

The behavior I think I was intending was that the order would be as in the source file (which because I routinely use the CR_ClassCleaner add-in to re-org my classes is nearly always alphabetical for me), but the more I think about it the more I think your question has actually uncovered another really cool feature I need to consider: a toggle for sort-elements-by-alphabetical-order.

This way, users can have their cake and eat it too. Good point.

By: Paige Cook

Paige Cook — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:33:09 +0000

Sounds great. I really like the additional features you are looking to add, especially the Text String Pattern matching. I am a ReSharper user and I use that functionality all of the time. I have not used the Source Code Outliner PowerToy much (actually forgot I had it installed). But after reading this post, I plan to start using it more as it will provide some functionality I have been looking for. However, I will definitely switch to the DX_SourceOutliner when it is released.

I agree that you should try to keep it only dependent upon DXCore, because if it does become dependent upon CodeRush and RefactorPro!, that would prevent me from using it. Along those lines however, it would be cool that for folks who have CodeRush, RefactorPro, ReSharper, etc. to be able to tell DX_SourceOutliner (or have it detect them) and use the built-in functions of those tools.

Thanks!

By: Harry S.

Harry S. — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:00:46 +0000

Sounds awesome as always, Steve. I especially like the idea of being able to do basic refactoring like rename from a tool window. One quick question: Do you intend the treeview to list members by type/alphabetical, or the order in which they appear in the code file (as it appears to now)? I can see arguments for going either way.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with!