I’m looking for a syntax highlighter for Visual Studio Express. I love Visual Assist, however it only works with Visual Studio Professional Edition, not Express.
Visual Studio 2010 actually has fairly decent syntax highlighting but there are some things I really miss from Visual Assist that I’m hoping I can find for VS Express, specifically:
- Highlighting local variables in bold, and italicizing stable variables and methods.
- Highlighting variables/methods/objects throughout a file just by clicking on it, and highlighting reads in a different color than writes (VS colors reads/writes the same color).
- Syntax highlighting within Intellisense and auto-complete option dialogs.
In addition to just syntax highlighting it would also be great to have the some of the shortcuts like Visual Assist offers, like easily finding files in your solution/project, or switching between .h/.cpp files in C++. I also really like how IntelliJ IDEA’s IDE takes you to a definition if you hold CTRL and click on a symbol.
I’d prefer something free or cheap, but I’m willing to pay for something if it’s worth it.
And just to provide some background, I must use VS2010 because I’m developing a game engine in XNA 4.0, and it only works with Visual Studio. Otherwise I would definitely be open to suggestions of just using an IDE with more options, like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse.
The answer to this is in the comment by Cody Gray: