SyntaxEditor for WPF Language Designer enhancements (part 1)

Many customers of our WinForms and WPF SyntaxEditor controls have asked for an easy way to get started building language definitions.  Languages definitions can be confusing when you are new to the product.  As we have been working on our next generation SyntaxEditor framework (used in the WPF version), we decided that having a robust Language Designer application would be extremely useful for customers.  The Language Designer is intended to be the ideal place to go when building a language definition for use with SyntaxEditor.

First builds

Up until now, the Language Designer (included with the WPF SyntaxEditor) was very simplistic and only allowed you to generate several classes that could be used with programmatic lexers.  It is and always has been our goal to add a lot more functionality to the app as we move forward and the next WPF Studio maintenance release will make a big step towards that goal. 

Language projects and definitions

Also of note is that up until now, the WPF version of SyntaxEditor has been able to load the SyntaxEditor for WinForms dynamic language XML definitions directly.  We had that code in place as a stub until we could finalize a newer more flexible XML format that would work for all kinds of languages, not just ones with dynamic lexers.

In the next WPF Studio build, we have created language project files (.langproj) and language definition files (.langdef).  Language project files are what can be loaded and edited by the Language Designer app.  The Language Designer app can import a SyntaxEditor for WinForms dynamic language XML definition to create a new language project based on it.

The language project stores a lot of information about your language such as lexer configuration, classification types, etc.  We still have a lot of other language-related features that we want to make editable via the Language Designer and won’t make the cut for this next build.  But these other features will be added in the future.

The Language Designer then can let you generate code based on your language project.  The generated code may include C#/VB code, and/or a language definition file.  The language definition is a file that can be loaded at run-time to auto-configure a language for use.  Think of it as the replacement for the WinForms dynamic language XML definitions.

Features in-depth

Over the coming days, we’ll blog with some screenshots showing the numerous enhancements we’ve recently made to the Language Designer.  These updates will be in the next maintenance release of WPF Studio, which will be released as soon as the Language Designer updates are complete and documented.

The next post will describe running the app for the first time and how to get started creating a new language project.