Brainstorming SyntaxEditor for WPF’s IntelliPrompt signture info

August 19, 2009 at 4:19 AM

We’re currently working on multiple SyntaxEditor for WPF features at the same time, while brainstorming some others that will be implemented in the future. One of the features we plan on implementing in the future is signature info, which is akin to the feature known as parameter info in Visual Studio 2008. The term “signature” is used in the VS 2010 object model and does make more sense than “parameter” since sometimes the displayed items in the popup don’t have parameters.

We’d like to know what features you’d like to have implemented for signature info. We have some initial ideas laid out here but some helpful comments from our customers would be:

How would you like to populate the data for this feature?
What sort of object model design would you like? We know there will be an ISignatureInfoSession, but should we separate things out to have the “items” of the session be called ISignature, and have each one of those have zero or more ISignatureParameter items? This way the signature could more easily know which parameter is current and therefore which to bold.
Which options would you like to see?
Have any other suggestions?

Please post comments here or email us with suggestions. Now is the time to get your thoughts in!

Tags: wpf, syntaxeditor

Filed under: Actipro, In development, WPF

August 19, 2009 at 22:48

I think the parameter/signature info box is excellect as is, so i'd be quite happy if the new object model was workable in the same way as the current one... (especially when I can get my TextRanges right!!). The only thing I don't like about it is the inability to update it without a bit of flicker.

However, if I was going to get the info box to do automatic parameter negotiation then I would like to:

a) Be able to specify completely separate text for selected or not. The reason I say this is because I have <param> <type> for each parameter / entity. When selected, both are bold, and type is in blue. When not selected, both are regular weight, both black.
b) Be able to be very specific about how parameters are changed. For example - if I have a function ABC which takes two parameters, then ABC(somefunc(1,2,3).somemethod would still be highlighting the first parameter. It may be that the existing UpdateParameterIndex call already does this, but the documentation on it didn't really give any indication of how it worked, so i 'rolled my own'.
c) Be able to choose whether the info box closed itself when going 'past the end of the list'. As per the above example, ABC(1,2,3 - that's the third param for a 2 param function - whether the info box closes, retains the highlight on the last parameter or leaves all parameters unhighlighted should be an option.

Hope those help!

Matt Whitfield

August 20, 2009 at 21:43

One other (very) late night thought - I'm not sure if this makes sense in the WPF world, because I'm not a WPF developer - but i'd appreciate being able to draw the background for an intelliprompt tooltip myself... i would change the colour, make the borders rounded & add a 2px border, and probably put a slight gradient on the tooltip background.

Then if the tooltip text rendering could happen on top of that, that would be just the ticket...

August 20, 2009 at 22:08

Matt,

Yes you can easily implicitly style the primitive control used to host quick info even now. Via a custom style you could do the things you mentioned and the content would just appear inside. Things like that make WPF a joy to work in.

Bill Henning (Actipro)