We’ve just made the WPF Studio 2009.2 build 512 maintenance release available. This maintenance release focuses on various bug fixes, but we’ve also made some significant updates to SyntaxEditor for WPF, mostly under the hood.
SyntaxEditor for WPF work-in-progress features
SyntaxEditor should now perform much better when using custom classification taggers.
We also have started laying the framework pieces needed to support code outlining (folding). The three main components of this are collapsed text, intra-text spacing/adornments, and an outlining manager. Note that these components are work-in-progress, may still change, and currently are undocumented.
Collapsed text refers to the ability to “hide” a region of text so that the caret skips right over it.
Intra-text spacing means being able to insert custom-sized spacers in between certain text characters. Then you can render custom adornments in those spaces. This feature allows you to insert images or other content (even controls) right in the document.
Let’s take a look at a sample we’re developing to be released once these features are all complete:
Here we use one tag to collapse a region of text, another tag to reserve some space in its place, and an adornment manager to render the “…” box in that space.
The third component to code outlining is an outlining manager, which is what we’re working on right now. The outlining manager will help drive the other features to provide a result like above.
The neat thing about our design is that you can use collapsed regions and intra-text spacing/adornment features independent of outlining. This opens up some interesting possibilities.
Look for blog posts in the future discussing these features in more detail once we make some more progress on the outlining manager. And again, please note that they are currently undocumented. We’ll document them and provide samples once they have been finalized.