Today, we released SharpDevelop 2.2.1. This is a bug fix release with two updated external software packages: NUnit 2.4.2 and SharpDevelop Reports 2.2.0.235. It is recommend that you upgrade to this point release.

In revision 2583, I added the XamlBinding and WPF Designer to the setup of SharpDevelop 3.0.

XamlBinding is a language binding that integrates .xaml files into SharpDevelop's code-completion infrastructure.
Here is an example of SharpDevelop showing a tool tip for a property in a .xaml file:

A window in .xaml is a partial class: one part is generated from the .xaml file, the other is the user code. If the xaml file specifies a name for an element, the compiler will generate a field that can be used by the user code. XamlBinding adds code-completion support for such fields:

As you can see in the "Search Results" window, "Find references" now searches for references in .xaml files. The "rename" refactoring will update both the XAML and C# code.

Finally, the WPF designer that I wrote earlier this year is now integrated in SharpDevelop. Here is a screen shot:

The designer replaces SharpDevelop's property grid with its own, WPF-based property grid. This property grid will provide support for editing attached properties and data binding in the future.

Unlike the Windows Forms designer, which is included in the .NET Framework and merely hosted by SharpDevelop (which isn't as easy as it sounds); the WPF designer is written from scratch. Thankfully WPF makes this a lot easier than writing a Windows Forms designer from scratch would be.

The WPF designer is still missing lots of features; I would welcome any help.

You can download preview builds of SharpDevelop 3.0 from our build server.

The current episode of .NET Rocks! has me talking about SharpDevelop, its history, the challenges, its goals and where we are headed. I wrote about the show in my personal blog too, so please check there for more information.

Another new addition to our Web offerings: the online code formatter. It is based on the syntax highlighter of SharpDevelop's text editor, and thus supports quite a few formats out of the box: SP/XHTML, BAT, Boo, Coco, C++.NET, C#, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Patch, PHP, TeX, VBNET, XML. In addition the Web form, I also added a Web service that can be used in your application to perform code conversion, a sample is available.

Noteworthy: the Web offerings are built upon the sample you can find in the source download (revisions 2522 upwards) - \Samples\HtmlSyntaxColorizer.

Our online code converter has been extended with the SnippetParser that Daniel wrote about on this blog. Now you can convert entire classes, or just code snippets. Please note that snippet conversion is only available for C# and VB.NET.

Yesterday, I added a snippet parser to NRefactory. It tries to parse the input code as a compilation unit (full file containing class definitions), class body (=list of methods, properties, ...), statement list and expression. The result that produces the least number of syntax errors gets chosen.

This is useful for our online code converter, because often one wants to convert a simple code snippet and not a full file.

Here is the example code that converts the string "input" from C# to VB.NET:

Last weekend, we held a #develop developer days (#d^3) meeting in Karlsruhe. There were five us that managed to free up the Easter schedule: Daniel (lead developer SharpDevelop), Dickon (data tools SharpDevelop), Peter (lead developer SharpDevelop Reports), Alex (PM SharpDevelop Reports) and myself (PM SharpDevelop). As you can guess, our focus was on data(base) support inside SharpDevelop.

Dickon gave us a tour of the database tools as they exist today - to get everyone on the same page as to where we stand (code-wise) and where Dickon wants to take the feature:

That of course ended in a whiteboarding session by Dickon (left), Daniel (right) and me:

The lowdown: a name change, restructuring and the decision to drop the current implementation of the db tools from the 2.x branch. After all, we have a couple of consumers (like SharpDevelop Reports) for the data tools in 3.0.

Daniel presented two things - first, the state of affairs with regards to our XAML designer:

This presentation then commenced with LINQ features already present in SharpDevelop 3.0 "Montferrer" today:

Peter & Daniel spent a considerable amount of time ripping out the load / save engine from SharpDevelop Reports, replacing it with a much cleaner and faster one - that, however, means that existing files (v2.1) are no longer compatible with the next version (v2.2 due in June).

Otherwise of note is that all five of us were using Windows Vista on their laptops (I suppose MS would rejoice if the majority of the user base would be that keen to work on Vista!), and that as always we visited a couple of nice restaurants (Brauhaus Moninger and Kanya's [sites in German])

After 13 months in development, we are proud to release v2.1 (detailed announcement). This release contains a lot of features we consider essential for writing quality code, such as code analysis. A list of what's new was compiled by Matt, who is also maintaining our feature tour.

Stepping out of SharpDevelop's shadow is SharpDevelop Reports, which is the reporting solution formerly known as SharpReport. A lot of feature work lies ahead (roadmap details), so look forward to a full-featured open source .NET reporting solution!

Release announcement