An important part of the blog will be code snippets. I thought it would be prettier if these snippets had the same nicely coloured syntax as I have in Visual Studio 2005. As will all things computer based things are never easy, and take time. After a good hour or so of messing around I found the following:
i) Copying and pasting to Word or Frontpage will convert the text to HTML (of a fashion..), but spacing and fonts are not retained, and the time spent cleaning up the code is probably equal to manually coding the HTML from scratch.
ii) I found a .NET macro that can be added to Visual Studio at Jeff Atwood’s blog – Coding Horror. This was a useful exercise in seeing how .NET macros could be written and run from Visual Studio, and what is involved in converting the text. Unfortunately when posting in the WordPress code box there were gaps appeared between code lines that had to be deleted manually. For large amounts of code this became somewhat annoying…
iii) The solution! A link from the page at Coding Horror suggested a Visual Studio Add-In created by Colin Coller at his blog Needs Improvement – the latest version can be found here. This Add-In creates a short cut when right clicking on selected code in Visual Studio, with a variety of options such as including code line numbers, and setting indent levels. The HTML can be pasted in WordPress and is displayed perfectly. The only minor problem seems to be if I then run the spell checker some spaces disappear. I’ll just have to be more careful when writing in futur.
Another interesting find, that is not really a requirement for the blog, is this web control. This allows a code text property to be set and when the web page is generated it can be rendered with syntax highlighting from a wide choice of programming languages.
1 Public Sub VeryHappy()
2
3 Dim LotsOfTimeSaved As Long = 10
4
5 Try
6 ‘copying and pasting
7 LotsOfTimeSaved += 10
8 Catch ex As Exception
9 ‘not needed =)
10 Finally
11 ‘no need to search for another solution!
12 End Try
13
14 End Sub
I’ve since found the following link which allows VB code to be pasted online to return HTML – http://www.zilpher.com/colourcode.php
All projects I’ve worked on have a few days set aside for the dreaded “documentation.” Clients often try and reduce the billable hours set aside for documentation and when project delivery times are closing its often the last thing on a developers mind, so it gets cut from both sides.
