I am proud to announce a new utility here on Ookii.org: FormatC.
FormatC is a utility that allows you to add syntax highlighting to your C#, Visual Basic, C++, XML, HTML, Transact-SQL or PowerShell source code, so you can publish it on a web page or blog post.
Why does the world need yet another syntax highlighter? Mainly, because of none of the existing .Net based ones had the features I needed. That's right, FormatC is the utility I've been using to format source code for my own blog. So if you read my site you've already seen many examples, including this one which demonstrates one of those features I mentioned: Visual Basic XML literals. I dare say I'm one of the first to actually support that, although it does have some limitations (which are mentioned on the FormatC page). In fact, I have support for all C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0 features, including Linq.
You can format your source code using the interface on my site and simply copy/paste the results into a webpage or blog post, and customize the highlighting by editing the provided style sheet (or simply keep the default). You can also download FormatC as a class library to use in your own application, or look at the source code. It's designed to be easily extensible, so you can add your own languages if you want.
If you use it, let me know what you think.
In case you missed it (which I think is only possible if you read no blogs except mine),
Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 was released today. Beta 2 fixes some of the issues that beta 1 had and brings a lot of new stuff
to the table especially for the casual user (beta 1 really was only a developer preview, after all). It's
definitely worth checking out.
Some of you may remember that my Find As You Type add-on didn't exactly work very well in beta 1. So what's the story with beta 2?
First of all: IE8 now includes functionality similar to Find As You Type! This will surprise precisely no one since the feature was originally planned for IE7 but postponed. Now with IE8 beta 2, it's finally in there. IE8's new find functionaly works pretty much the same as my FAYT add-on, so there's really not much reason to keep using FAYT.
However, for those of you that do wish to keep using FAYT (for instance for some of features that IE8's new built-in find lacks, such as customization, auto-start, and immediate search while using an IME), there is good news also: unlike with beta 1, Find As You Type works fine with IE8 beta 2. The only thing that appears broken is that if you press CTRL-F when the focus is on the browser chrome (e.g. the address bar or search box), the FAYT toolbar does not open, instead IE's own find opens. If you press CTRL-F while a page has focus, the FAYT toolbar will open just like it does in IE7. I suspect this has something to do with the modified process model that IE8 uses for tabs.
Please let me know your experiences with FAYT and IE8, if you have any.
My good friend Christian Liensberger is giving away two MSDN Premium with Visual Studio Team System subscriptions, worth nearly $11,000! To be eligable you need to create a short screencast about a Microsoft technology, e.g. "how to get started with Silverlight 2". The competition runs from July 1st until July 31st. I will be helping with the judging.
See Christian's blog for full details.
Microsoft has just released a new version of Windows Search, which is well worth getting if you have Vista because it's much faster than the built-in Vista search. Searching using the start menu search box feels at least five times faster now!
Get it here.
Long Zheng has started the Windows UX Taskforce. The goal: to create a list of all the little UI inconsistencies and annoyances in Windows, so that Microsoft might fix them for Windows 7.
So if there's anything that bothers you about the Windows Vista UI, now's your chance to let people know.
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