Adapting DevStudio 97 to Our Needs

An ideal development environment would provide us with some facilities which aim to create scriptlets automatically and, therefore, to provide quick previews and some shortcuts for inserting standard blocks of code, such as the

<SCRIPT>

</SCRIPT>
tag.

All this, and more, can be accomplished through the automation interface exposed by Microsoft Developer Studio 97.

Only the Developer Studio shipped with Visual Studio 97 offers adequate support for advanced user customization. Previous versions limit this feature to AppWizards and toolbar changes.

The newest product, however, also offers great support for macros and add-ins and exposes a comprehensive object model to let you literally build your own environment. Yes, this sounds exactly like the kind of support we're interested in.

Our goal is to have the following tools and utilities:

A rich and powerful text-editor
Syntax-highlighting
A quick browser
Shortcuts for the most commonly used pieces of code
A wizard to build bare-bones scriptlets in just a few seconds

We can wait for the tools to arrive (if they ever do), or we can assemble our own using the WebBrowser control and some other specialized components. Both these solutions are fairly time-consuming and—above all—not immediately available. A better approach is exploiting what already exists, and has been designed to let you build your own extensions on top.

To start with, the following paragraph will offer a quick tour of the Developer Studio 97 facilities we're going to use next.