VS.Net 2003 Intellisense addin for MASM

[Jeff]

well he did say "24 hours from now" 20 hours ago so we have to wait another 4 hours.  :D

[sluggy]

well he did say "24 hours from now" 20 hours ago so we have to wait another 4 hours.  :D

Heh, almost, my little smurfs  :green

I tested out the new install i made last night, it works with the exception of the MASM32.dll is not being registered, so i will fix that tonight, and probably release in the morning. I will put an announcement in this thread once it is done. Did i ever say that VS really sucks the big one when it comes to making installs??!!

Thanks for your patience :)

[sluggy]

Ok guys, the new version is up. I have tested it on a clean version of VS, it still has one small problem, you have to manually register the MASM32.dll. I have decided to go with this version so that you don't have to wait any longer.  I am going to convert it to using Wise to build the msi, i will have way more power and way less problems that way, plus i know Wise inside out.

When you install it, make sure you:

- uninstall through the add/remove programs applet, or by rerunning the msi and choosing "uninstall"
- rerun any reg files you ran, but with the "/u" switch to take them out of the registry
- make sure you select "Everyone" when it asks who you want to install for

I notice that the first keyword on the page gets the red squiggly line and the message "parser could not recover", i am not sure why this is happening (i haven't noticed it until you guys mentioned it), but it is of low impact (ie has no effect on the rest of the page or on assembling).

I also haven't been able to replicate the issue where custom settings get messed up, but if it still happens then let me know.

Cheers

[Jeff]

well i reinstalled and reregistered.  not much difference from the last but i understand you were just trying to correct the installer.  fortunately my toolbars were spared (might have something to do with VS being open when i installed and registered).


now im not sure if this is how you intended it but this is what i see.  not much coloring as you can see.  case sensitive?  well, just a heads up.

and just in case if you missed my suggestion:

the commenting worked out good.  would it be possible to adjust it so an undo uncomments everything? (right now i would have to undo each line individually).  i cant say much more on this yet so i'll have to wait a bit.

[sluggy]

Hi Jeff,
no, it is misbehaving because you are doing something with Java in the same IDE at the same time  :bdg :bdg

Actually, you are totally correct, it is currently mostly case sensitive. All the keywords are matched if you do them in lower case, but only a few are currently matched in upper or mixed case. Some of them (like the MASM directives/macros) are currently only uppercase. It is actually a fair amount of tedious work to get them all case insensitive, there is a regex for every keyword to match, and to modify between 500 and 600 of those takes a while  :P Here is an example of the same version you are running with one of my source files:


Like i said earlier, it is currently oriented to my coding preferences  :dance: :bg But seriously, i will be changing it soon to make the keywords case insensitive. And the more comments or ideas you guys come up with, the better, because i can't guess every particular way that people code, they have to tell me.

Regarding the commenting: i didn't miss your comment. It works fine for me, select the lines of code, hit CTRL+K CTRL+C to comment it, highlight the lines again and hit CTRL+K CTRL+U to uncomment it.

Cheers

BTW, have you seen my instructions for setting up asm projects in VS, so that you can use all the standard build and debug features? (so you can press F5 and your project builds and runs, etc)

[Jeff]

sluggy,
i havent seen your instructions on setting up projects.  could you provide a link or explain about it here?

as for the commenting, i didnt know about the uncomment part.  or at least, i dont remember seeing that in your initial post.  :P  but i thought that it might be a good idea to make the whole action be completely undo-/redo-able for the sake of completedness.

[GregL]

sluggy,

I un-installed the older one and installed the new one. The install worked. The functionality is the same as before. It set my toolbars to the default again, no big deal, I'm getting fast at putting them back how I like them. :bg  This is an useful Add-in. I hope you continue to improve it.

Some things I would like to see:

• Prefix all of the settings that show up in 'Fonts and Colors' with MASM or something, so you can tell which ones are for MASM and which ones are for C.
• A separate editable file for keywords so they can be customized.
• Case insensitive keywords.

I haven't seen your instructions on setting up MASM projects either. I know how to use makefile projects, is that what you are doing?.

[sluggy]

i havent seen your instructions on setting up projects.  could you provide a link or explain about it here?

I haven't seen your instructions on setting up MASM projects either. I know how to use makefile projects, is that what you are doing?.

Heh, it's in the old forum, which is why you wouldn't have seen it. Check it out here :U

[a_h]

Hi sluggy!

Great addon! I hope you haven't stopped yet the development! Looking forward to your next version - would be great if it could register the dll itself. By the way, a .686 brings the parser out of step (could not recover...).

Thanks for your work! Hannes

[sluggy]

Hi guys,
the new version is up. The main changes are:

- fully case insensitive with the asm keywords. This is very easy to do by telling Flex to compile case insensitive, but that was too easy, i did it the hard way of modifying the regex for every single keyword. There may still be one or two MASM specific keywords i haven't done yet, i'll check on those for next release.

- i fixed the installer. Well, actually i dumped the install written with VS2003, and wrote it using Wise. Seems VS has a bug where it will not set up dlls correctly, and as you don't have access to the underlying tables in the msi it makes it kinda hard to fix. This install was tested on a *clean* fully patched WinXP Prof system. Make sure you correctly uninstall the old version before installing this one.

Now, did i mention how much MS's Virtual PC sucks??? (compared to VMWare). It is slow, bloated, prone to corruption, yadda yadda yadda  :green

[sluggy]

Hi Hannes,
thanks  :P VS is one of the greatest editors out there, i am glad to be able to give it some asm capability. Once i get this version of the addin reasonably mature, i will port it to VS2005, that editor has even nicer features.

By the way, a .686 brings the parser out of step (could not recover...).

That bug had been reported, i haven't traced what is causing it yet, but it isn't major as everything still works normally after that little parser trip up. I have just released another version, i will see if i can fix that bug by the end of the month, but no promises as it is almost impossible to debug this sort of thing at the source level.

[Polizei]

Yo, sluggy, does this goodie works with the MacroSoft Visual Studio .NET 2oo5 (Enterprise) ??

[sluggy]

Yes and no - it will work on VS2005, but it doesn't get loaded by it because certain registry keys need to be installed, and currently those keys are only installed for VS2003.
I am at an interesting stage with this tool - do i continue developing it for VS2003, or do i port it to VS2005 and finish it for that IDE? There is a bit more doco for language services in VS2005, but not a lot more, and most of it applies to VS2003 as well. And there is a lot of stuff that isn't documented, which makes development that much harder  :eek

And i better mention that i have fixed the bug that caused the parser to crash - i will post the fix for it when i get back from holiday.

[thomas_remkus]

This sounds like a really helpful tool but we are all just using VS2005 right now in my office. Please let us know when you have the VS2005 working because I'd love to install.

[sluggy]

This sounds like a really helpful tool but we are all just using VS2005 right now in my office. Please let us know when you have the VS2005 working because I'd love to install.

Hi thomas,
i'm glad you like the plug in :)
Yes, it does build in VS2005 (at least it did last time i tried, i don't think i've broken it since....). I haven't worked on it in a while, i have a couple of other projects on at the moment, and as usual i'm rather busy with my real job. Because you have expressed some interest, i'll see if i can get a VS2005 release out in the next 4 weeks or so.

With this addin, what i have been concentrating on the most lately is the grammar rules, some of the features in MASM are tough to code rules for. I am also quickly coming to a roadblock with this version of the plugin - it uses the Babel style language implementation, and with this style it is impossible to implement some of the cooler features of the IDE, like collapsible sections and intellisense etc. If it isn't impossible then it might as well be as there is no doco for it anywhere. So, i am (almost) at the point where i retire that version of the plugin, and start writing a new one based on the MPF language service that was introduced with VS2005, with this it is possible to get full integration with the IDE, but it does mean a rewrite from the ground up  :eek