Dissecting a C♯ application : inside SharpDevelop

Learn advanced .NET programming techniques by getting an insiders' look at a complete application! SharpDevelop is a complete Integrated Development Environment, written in C#. It includes all the advanced features that programmers expect from a modern IDE and, of course, implementing these features has required some advanced programming techniques. The developers who created SharpDevelop give you an inside track on application development with a guided tour of the sourcecode for SharpDevelop. They will show you the most important code features and explain how you can use these techniques in your own projects. You will gain valuable experience of building an application on this scale, learning from the decisions, mistakes, problems and solutions that lead to the current version on SharpDevelop. The SharpDevelop team will show you how to: Build a highly modular application Provide a flexible, extendable, customizable user interface Manage the efforts of translators for effcient internationalization Represent and manipulate text efficiently Code search and replace functionality Construct reusable controls Implement a parser to provide syntax highlightingauto-completion as users type Use reflection to access information about .NET classes Create a Windows Forms designer Generate code programmatically All of these techniques are shown in the context of the source of the SharpDevelop application - a real piece of software that you can download and user yourself. This means that there are no 'toy' examples or theory that will not work in practice - just solid, real-world code and frank discussions of how it was created. Summary of Contents 4 About the Authors 13 Table of Contents 5 Introduction 16 Chapter 1 - Features at a Glance 21 Chapter 2 - Designing the Architecture 37 Chapter 3 - Implementing the Core 65 Chapter 4 - Building the Application with Add-ins 95 Chapter 5 - Providing Functionality with Workspace Services 121 Chapter 6 - The User Interface 149 Chapter 7 - Internationalization 183 Chapter 8 - Document Management 203 Chapter 9 - Syntax Highlighting 233 Chapter 10 - Search and Replace 249 Chapter 11 - Writing the Editor Control 277 Chapter 12 - Writing the Parser 305 Chapter 13 - Code Completion and Method Insight 343 Chapter 14 - Navigating Code with the Class Scout and the Assembly Scout 383 Chapter 15 - The Designer Infrastructure 427 Chapter 16 - Implementing a Windows Forms Designer 451 Chapter 17 - Code Generation 479 Index 513