Mathew Nolton Blog

Software dementia unleashed...

CodeMax-A component worth looking at.

About 3-4 years ago I wrote a tool called TemplateX that enabled the building of an application or a piece of an application using a template and an ASP syntax. I did much of this prior to .Net and it had much of the functionality plus some of what Eric Smith's CodeSmith does (but Eric did a much better job of marketing his tool and taking it to the next level with actually compiling .Net code. He also realized that you must charge little as well as provide a large library of templates to get people to use it..kudos Eric). At the time I needed an editor and I selected CodeMax. This is an awesome component and worthy of consideration for anyone doing syntax highlighting. It now costs $199 (it used to be free) but if anyone has actually ever considered writing the code for an editor that does syntax highlighting for a large document you understand the complexity and performance considerations you must take into account. It can be found here. http://winmain.com/

-Mathew C. Nolton

Posted: Dec 06 2004, 10:47 AM by MatiasN | with 8 comment(s)
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Comments

Paul Wilson said:

You've got the link right, but the name wrong: Eric Smith. :)
# December 6, 2004 11:10 AM

Mathew Nolton said:

Thanks Paul....Sorry Eric. I fixed it.
# December 6, 2004 11:12 AM

Frans Bouma said:

For our upcoming template studio application (template set editor / manager + code generator engine front-end IDE for LLBLGen Pro) we use Actipro's SyntaxEditor control, which is a native .NET control and has some advantages I think over CodeMax': it has multi-language support and the languages are Xml defined. Especially with template editors, where you have 2 languages (output and logic) to deal with, which can be different, it is key that you can define these separately and the editor control knows it's now in one language or the other. This is specifically important when you want to add intellisense (or some sort of intellisense) to the editor.

That said, codemax is a less expensive than actipro's control :)
# December 6, 2004 11:39 AM

Mathew Nolton said:

I know with CodeMax you can support multiple languages...but not in the same document...which was the only real problem I ran into with CodeMax....which is a real issue with an ASPish application.

Does SyntaxEditor provide hooks for Intellisense. I know that CodeMax does. In the old COM days I used to watch the keyboard movement to look for situations to show Intellisense, then I would search for CreateObject statements to then dynamically load the IDispatch interface and provide intellisense.

-Mathew
# December 6, 2004 12:00 PM

Jeff Gonzalez said:

I think Actipro is the same one that CodeSmith uses.
# December 6, 2004 2:42 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Yes, you can define in the language the triggers to make the control watch for. This is great as you can now have different triggers for different languages and the control knows when to react on which, as it knows in which language it is at that moment.

# December 6, 2004 3:19 PM

Mischa Kroon said:

Whats wrong with: scintilla.net ?
This has syntax highlighting right ?
# December 7, 2004 3:35 AM

Mathew Nolton said:

Personally, I haven't tried scintilla.net. Is it worth looking at?
-Mathew Nolton
# December 7, 2004 11:27 AM
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