Shoutbox

After what must be at least a year of not developing my old IDE i have decided to come back and build on what i had done. The one thing i want to do is bring the interface into the modern era and make it look nice and slick! (Using WPF)

In order to do this i want all your ideas, preferably sketches of the layout!

I'm going for a visual studio look with the docking panels (unless you have better ideas), there will be:

• Script/Project Explorer (Showing all the files relating to the script)
  
• Toolbox (A list of objects and controls to add to the interface windows)
  
• Property Editor (Used when editing a window, will show attributes relating to the currently selected control)
  
• Main editor area (A tabbed list of text editors and Interface/window editors)

I want this to look sexy so throw me your ideas please!

*reading my signiture i see its been over a 14 months since my last update, i apologise

One thing I really want to see, and I felt it was the downfall of the last preview you gave us, would be the ability to edit scripts already installed not just those whose PLSC is already packed.

If you have Windows 7 you should take a look at Paint.Net. It has a really slick and clean look making full use of aero.

If you could make a scripting IDE and actually release it, you'd be my hero. Seriously!

So many attempts have been made by so many people, but so far all failed to deliver something which could be considered useful. I tried to make one myself too once, but got no further than a few docked panels and some toolbars in a window.

The interface XML is just tedious to write and should really be generated by a windows designer similar to the designer for WinForms and WPF. There's no decent IntelliSense support for script files either, apart from the built-in editor. I believe a decent scripting IDE would revolutionize the whole scripting community.

Things I'd love to see:

• Pixel-perfect window rendering inside the window designer. That's a bit exaggerated though - if you could come close to replicating the rendering of windows and controls as done by Plus! so that you can more or less see how your window would look like, I'd be more than happy.
  
• Project Settings panel to generate ScriptInfo file. I believe it would be cool if you could alter ScriptInfo.xml without touching any XML at all. In Visual Studio, you have all project-specific settings such as project name and build options in an easy-to-use panel, I think this could work for Plus! scripts as well.
  
• IntelliSense for Plus! objects and events in JS files. Try not to hard-code these, these are exposed by the Plus! DLLs and you should be able to extract their names and parameters.
  
• I think Visual Studio is a great example of IDE design. Since the scripting IDE would share many features with VS, try to use the same design concepts and layout. It'll make your project feel more native and easier to use (at least to me).
  
• For the PLSC builder, make it possible to include/exclude certain files or directories from being copied to the PLSC. Script developers may have strange structures in their script folder. For example, I have Photoshop files in the Images folder and a subfolder with previous builds of my script. It'd be cool if I could just hit a button and don't have to worry about including unneeded files or forgetting necessary files.

I'm really looking forward to see how this project goes.

Some good ideas there actually! Some of what you have said has already been built (creating PLSCs/ScriptInfo Editor) but generating REAL intelliSense for JScript files is a bit harder in my opinion (picking up on local variables, user defined functions etc...) although it is something i had planned on a long time ago.

My plan at the minute is to convert the interface to WPF and probabily implement some of those features! I'll then take a look at a few scripting features.

As for the GUI i really would like some innovative sketches that improve on Visual Studio 2010 and maybe make it more specific to Plus! Scripts.

I'd like to see a "Properties" and "Events" pane for windows and controls! Like Visual Studio for C#/VB(.Net) forms/controls. You can select a control (or the window itself) and modify its properties, and create event handlers for it. Of course, for properties that are not strings: we have a drop-down menu for multiple choices (True/False, reference to other elements, ...), number-only textfield for numbers, color picker for colors, etc!
I actually think the data structure (or how it should be called) is not hard to create as long as we have the source file of the schema.

As for pixel-precise window rendering - I believe it's gonna be a lot of nasty work without Yuna releasing Plus!'s window rendering codes.

Its very easy to create the properties for ever plus object by running the xsd.exe tool on the schema file. The problem comes when that data is far from friendly when trying to view it in the property grid due to the complexness of a plus interface. In my new attempt i think i'm going to create my own property grid to deal with the objects instead of making a proxy class for every original object

Wouldn't it be easier to create an extension for one of the big IDE's out already? Like Netbeans or Eclipse.

quote:

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Originally posted by Ezra
Wouldn't it be easier to create an extension for one of the big IDE's out already? Like Netbeans or Eclipse.

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You could build an extension on VS using the Visual Studio Shell, that way you already have a work space which just needs to be extended with whatever you want. Users would have to install the Visual Studio Shell SDK in order to run the program, but I believe this is reasonable seeing all the benefits it offers. For example, JScript syntax highlighting is already fully available, including local variables and user-defined functions, you'd just need to add the Plus! specific objects and events. You'll also have less to worry about the GUI and focus more on the actual workings of the IDE.

It appears like he already has a lot of work done in WPF though. If he wants to switch to VS Isolated Shell, it may turn out to be a lot of work. He'd have to create a new project and learn about how to create VS Shell extensions. However, if he has already managed to build something that complex from scratch in WPF, I believe he would be able to pull it off. It just depends on whether it's actually worth it.

I had thought about an extension to the VS IDE but that requires people downloading Visual Studio or the Express edition (not even sure if the express edition would come with JScript etc)

Actually did a bit of research there as well, it's something i may look into ( i have used the custom project extensions before) so that could be applied to plsc files. The one thing driving me towards using Visual Studio (Web Express) is the built in intellisense for JScript which is hard to implement myself.

Main concerns about using Visual Studio are:

• Opening a directory as a project for installed scripts
  
• The large size of Express Editions and the hastle for everyone
  
• Integrating a custom designer for the XML files (never seen this done with an extension to VS. Feel free to point me to one)!

One thing i suppose is that if i had a Visual Studio extension built to begin with i could take my time to develop my own IDE more afterwards

*update 2

upon digging deep into creating VS extensions i can safely say it is more work than updating and completing my own IDE which is a big shame because i love VS's interface

quote:

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Originally posted by effection
upon digging deep into creating VS extensions i can safely say it is more work than updating and completing my own IDE which is a big shame because i love VS's interface

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I guess it's not worth it to build a VS extension then

As for intellisense, I think there are some open-source IDEs (not sure if there's any for JScript) that have them. Maybe you could dig into their codes.