DXCore - Free library for creating plugins in Visual Studio
In this article, we want to give a brief overview of DXCore and explain how this .NET library can be useful.
DXCore is an absolutely free product that we have been developing and supporting since 2004. In a nutshell, DXCore makes it easy to develop extensions for Visual Studio.
We are trying to design the API of this library in such a way as to simplify the process of creating plugins as much as possible so that developers can focus on functionality and, if possible, avoid the main difficulties of integration with Visual Studio.
DXCore is designed for those who lack something in Visual Studio and who need to expand their development environment. We can say that not everyone has such a desire, and that in Visual Studio everything is already there and there is nothing to add to it. And that may be fair.
However, those developers who do not like to do monotonous and routine things always have a completely understandable desire to optimize their work by automating such routine things.
There are about 50 free open source plugins for DXCore . For example, there is a replacement for the standard dialogVisual Studio to add assembly references. The standard dialog is somewhat slow, even though in Visual Studio 2010, loading available assemblies is done in a separate thread.
Based on DXCore, CodeRushXpress is developed - another free DevExpress product. CodeRushXpress includes about 50 refactoring and functionality for navigating and creating declarations in code.
So, the main services of DXCore:
- Integration with Visual Studio
The library implements a system of extensions (plug-ins), built on the principle of components. Several basic types of plugins are supported: a standard plugin, a plugin for creating ToolWindow, a plugin for creating an options page. - Display of graphical information in a text editor
Services and an event system have been implemented to simplify the process of displaying graphical information in a window of a text editor Visual Studio. There are a number of ready-made graphic elements. - Parsing, transforming and generating code
The following languages are supported: C #, Visual Basic, C ++, JavaScript. DXCore also contains services for working with CSS, HTML, XML, XAML. - Working with projects and files
DXCore provides its own API for working with projects and files in Visual Studio. - Code analysis
There are services for finding links and declarations in code, determining and deducing (type inference) data types of expressions, loading and analyzing metadata of .NET assemblies.
If you are interested, here is the link where you can download the DXCore library .
In future articles, we would like to examine in more detail each of these areas. What do you want to see first?
