I say Annotate that!!!

  Fresh off the grill or should I say warmed after deep freeze? I will leave that up to you. But I thought it was about time to let you all party on the Source Code Annotation sample, developed by one of my assistants, Chetan N Parmar at Tech Ed 2004 Visual Studio Extensibility Cook off. On second thought I am not going to call this is a sample because I don’t think it is complete enough to be a sample. I would love to have you contribute to this idea and make it an awesome, irresistibly appealing and indispensable utility for the community. How does that sound? Are you the one, Neo? What does the oracle say? Did the oracle mention that you are going to be involved in the coolest project on this earth?

Rhetoric aside I would like to invite all the gurus, mateurs alike to contribute to this project and other cool projects in near future. Let’s all work together to deliver this super cool utility that is going to help the community. If you want to volunteer, drop the Doctor a piece of email with the area that you would like to work on.

What is this Annotation Package about?

            The primary goal of this package is to allow developers to annotate their code so they can start short discussions about a specific implementation, or tag sections in the code file that need special attention. The best of all is they can share the annotations in a team environment so other developers can contribute to the discussion. The project currently provides the following functionality:

· Create an annotation at any given line

· Respond to Annotations

· Delete Annotations

· View the annotations as text markers and in the tool window

Currently it implements a text marker service that indicates where the annotations exist on a particular file, a text marker class that draws a square arrow on the widget margin of the IDE to indicate the presence of an annotation and a tool window that allows you to manage (respond/delete) the annotations for a file. After you have built and registered the project you can load the annotations package by clicking the “Load Annotations” menu in the Solution Context menu. You can start adding annotations to a file from the code window context menu under “Annotations” sub menu. To hide the annotation, just left click on the Annotation marker in the widget margin. Enabling annotations for a solution adds an Annotation.xml file to the solution. However this file does not yet get added to the solution so the user will not see it but it should be created in the same folder as the solution.

Here are some of the features that I feel would be great to have and are up for grabs. If you want to implement it just drop the doctor a piece of email.

· Add the Annotations XML file to the solution

· Support the source control scenario. When the Annotation.xml file is under Source control and someone tries to edit an annotation it should silently check out the file and edit it.

· Track the document rename events and update the annotations appropriately

· Convert the Annotation Manager tool window into a splitter tool window

· Make the marker behave well with other markers sharing the same area in margin widget like the break point markers

As with all community projects this also has bugs so feel free to send them my way and I would get them addressed. Better yet, if you know the solution feel free to post the recommended change. This code was written in a very short period of time for the cook-off so don’t be surprised with any unexpected results. Since the Tech Ed all that has been done to the sample is getting rid of memory leaks and re-factoring.

Known Issues:

· Annotation.xml file does not get added to the solution as a solution item

· Responding to responses show up as hanging responses when viewing annotations for other files

This package is developed using ATL. You would need the following

· Visual Studio 2003

· You must have the VSIP 2003 SDKinstalled, without this the Annotation package would not load

Where to get the sources:

You can download the source code for the 1.0 release of this project from here . Once you are on that page click the ‘Releases’ link under ‘Annotation Package’ panel on left side of the web page. Feel free to download the sources and party on it. If you want to join the working group and contribute to the project apply to join the Workspace through using the ‘Apply to Join this Workspace’ link on the right side under ‘Members panel. If you run into any issues you know who to contact.

Happy Annotating folks.

Thanks

Dr. eX