Thomas Johansen's Blog : AylarSolutions.Highlight

Highlight + NDoc = true

Aylar — Sat, 17 Apr 2004 13:05:00 GMT

Just finished up a nifty little util for parsing XML documentation files for use with NDoc. Yep, you guessed it! This means you can now have color highlighted code samples in your documentation.

To get it to work I had to alter a few source files for NDoc. Well if anyone is interested in trying this out, either contact me using the contact form or leave a comment here and I'll send you my app and the “hacked” ndoc binaries.

Bug discovered

Aylar — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 17:06:00 GMT

I just discovered and fixed a bug related to code blocks. Therefor I recommend you re-download the latest build:
http://highlight.aylarsolutions.com/downloads/AylarSolutions.Highlight-2.0.zip

As a result of this fix, all code parsed by the HTML engine, is now automatically encapsulated in <pre> tags.

How to integrate Highlight into .Text

Aylar — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 02:52:00 GMT

Scott just posted a very interesting piece on how to integrate Highlight into .Text
I highly suggest reading it!
http://scottwater.com/blog/archive/2004/03/11/11537.aspx

Definition aliases

Aylar — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 02:03:00 GMT

Just wanted to share an idea with you; I'm currently pondering the possiblity of adding alises to the definitions.
Eg. C# = CSharp, VB.NET = VB, J# = JSharp and so on. The reason for wanting to add this sort of support is to cater for user 'preference' really. Because if you want to give users this flexiblity in the current 2.0 release, you will need to create duplicate definitions in the configuration file.

Well I'd love to get some feedback on this - do you think this is useful, or should I spend my time on other areas?

Highlight 2.0 Demo

Aylar — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 13:27:00 GMT

Just finished uploading a very simple demo of Highlight 2.0. The sample takes advantage of the Extensions assembly - the CodeBlockHighlighter class

To see what Highlight can do, simply add some content to the textbox with some inline code. These sections of code needs to be encapsulated in [code language=“?“][/code] tags (Eg. [code language=”C#”]// a simple comment[/code] )

http://highlight.aylarsolutions.com/Samples/default.aspx

Enjoy! ;)

AylarSolutions.Highlight v2.0 Released

Aylar — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:39:00 GMT

I finally got around to putting it together and getting it online! :)
Only took me 4 months to ZIP it down and uploading <g>

Well it's pretty much the same as 1.x, except we've added more support for different elements you might want to highlight. Some bugfixes and performance tweaking. Although the biggest addition are the two new engines - one for RTF output and one for XML output.
There is also a new assembly - an extension of the basic component. This assembly currently only holds one class: CodeBlockHighlighter
This class is very handy if you want to highlight inline code elements, eg. code blocks in your article. If you are typing your articles using a control such RichTextBox or FreeTextBox, please set the InputIsHtmlEncoded property to true. This will make sure the generated output is as expected.

I am hoping to finish up the initial version of the component's homepage in the coming days, so you'll have a place to track the progress on upcoming verions, submit bugs and so on. - For now, simply add comments to this post, or contact me through the contact form if you have any feedback, bug reports or similar.

http://highlight.aylarsolutions.com/downloads/AylarSolutions.Highlight-2.0.zip

Markup Support in Online Demo

Aylar — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 13:18:00 GMT

In case you haven't noticed already - the online demo of AylarSolutions.Highlight, now has a definition called ASPX. Yeah, you guessed it, this means it actually highlights markup now :)
This one of the biggest new features in the next version of AylarSolutions.Highlight. Go check it out, and please give me some feedback!

AylarSolutions.Highlight

New build released

Aylar — Mon, 25 Aug 2003 13:52:00 GMT

We (That's me and Christian Nordbakk) have released a new build of AylarSolutions.Highlight. The download URL is the same as for the previous release, but for those who don't feel like digging through old posts for information, you can get it here

The biggest change you will encounter, is the fact that the default location for the configuration file is now in the running application's \bin folder, and the config file has changed name from Languages.xml to Definitions.xml. This name change was done to make sure the component is as generic as possible.
Another constructor for the Highlighter class has been added. This new constructor takes a XmlDocument as a parameter, which means you can eg. load the configuration from a MS SQL server into an XmlDocument object and pass it into the constructor.
The last major change is that we changed the PerformCodeHighlight method to Highlight, and that we removed the OutputType parameter from the method. This parameter is now a class level property of the Highlighter class

Enjoy!

Support for markup languages

Aylar — Wed, 20 Aug 2003 09:14:00 GMT

The design phase for some of the new features you can expect to see in AylarSolutions.Highlight 1.1 is well under way.
Perhaps one of the most exciting new features is built-in support for inline code. That means if you highlight an ASP.NET page, the component will highlight any code inside 'SCRIPT' blocks.
Because we add support for this, you can of course also expect to see support for markup languages. This will be available through a new pattern type, which will most likely end up being called 'Markup' (More detailed info to come)

AylarSolutions.Highlight online demo

Aylar — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 17:42:00 GMT

After getting a request for a sample of my component in use, I made this very simple demo:
http://aspalliance.com/aylar/highlight/tester.aspx

If you want the source for this, it can be found here:
http://aspalliance.com/aylar/highlight/tester.aspx.txt
(Note: most browsers tries to parse this as actual xml, so do a 'View Source' or similar to get the actual code.)

AylarSolutions.Highlight 1.0 - Released

Aylar — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 15:12:00 GMT

I have finally finished it! The first public release of AylarSolutions.Highlight (formerly known as CodeHighlight) is actually available. Go here to get it:

http://aspalliance.com/aylar/highlight/aylarsolutions.highlight-1.0.zip

Currently there is one known bug and that is with keywords that contains a space, i.e. VB.net's 'End Class', which by definition isn't a word, but rather a collection of words. I have solved this by adding an 'End' keyword to the VB.NET language definition.

Now, you are perhaps asking yourself, what is this AylarSolutions.Highlight thing Thomas is talking about, and what can it do for me?
Well, AylarSolutions.Highlight is a .NET component written in C#, that allows you to very easily get HTML marked-up code. All you need to do is to pass your code source through Highlighter.PerformCodeHighlight method and au voila, it spits out a marked-up version.

Currently the language definition file (Languages.xml), contains definitions for C#, VB.NET, J# and T-SQL. You can easily extend this small definition collection, either by altering the XML file by hand, or by taking advantage of the Configurator class that is shipped with the component (Note: the Configurator class is currently not working 100% due to some changes to the structure of the configuration file. This will be fixed in a couple of days).

For the future, I have planned to add support to generate XML and RTF marked-up code, as well as release a web and windows configuration application to allow you to more easily configure the component's configuration file.

Please give me some feedback on the control, either by adding comments to this post or emailing me at aylar AT aspalliance DOT com.

Update: I had forgotten to zip down the Languages.xml file, this is now fixed. This file should either be placed in the root of the application where you are running the component from, or specify its location using a web.config file or the ConfigurationFile property.