Question

Is there some way to get code highlighting / pretty text in VS2008 for DotNetNuke’s SqlDataProvider files? They’re very difficult to read otherwise.

For those who aren’t familiar with DotNetNuke, it’s mostly SQL code with some placeholders spread throughout.

Thanks

Answer 1

Check out this blog post from Brian Dukes at Engage Software about this very subject.

Editing .SqlDataProvider scripts within Visual Studio

By simply adding a .sqldataprovider key
to the correct location and giving it
the same value as the .sql key,
everything magically works as
expected.

The key to create is
HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio[version]\Languages\File
Extensions.sqldataprovider where
[version] is 7.1 for Visual Studio
.NET 2003, 8.0 for Visual Studio 2005,
etc. Those are the two versions I
updated, so those are the two I’m sure
of. You should be able to find other
versions without too much trouble. If
you’re into PowerShell (I’m getting
there), here are the four seperate
commands to run in order to add this
functionality to those two versions of
Visual Studio.

Commands for Visual Studio 2008

New-Item -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Languages\File Extensions\.sqldataprovider'
set-itemproperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Languages\File Extensions\.sqldataprovider' -name "(default)" -value "{FA6E5E79-C8EE-4D37-B79A-5067F8BD5630}"