VS Extension to manipulate HTML / CSS

Question

I am looking to enhance my programming experience and I believe I can do that by creating a Visual Studio (2012) extension. I have started to dig into the documentation on MSDN, but it's dense and I am working through it. I had a few questions: - Is an extension the correct approach for the scenario described below? - If so, any idea which namespace I should start digging into? - Any sage wisdom/links RE: "pitfalls" or "gotcha"? The Setup I have a block of HTML and it has some inline CSS on certain elements. I'd like to right-click on the element and apply the inline code to a new or existing stylesheet (CSS). The Code ```

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Accepted Answer

I made a small VS extension last year for class that turned out pretty well. It had to do with sorting, formatting and re-organizing C++ code files. It's a little different than what you want to do, but I can suggest that you take a look at CodeMaid. It has a surprising number of features, and since it's open source, the source code really helped me out when I was working on my extension.

Unfortunately, you're working with HTML and Visual Studio only provides the code model (basic AST) for C# and a small bit of C++. You're unlikely to get any help from visual studio with HTML editing.

So I would do 2 things. First, look at these tutorials. They'll help you create the base for your extension and get you familiar with the API. (You'll likely have to look for others to augment your knowledge, as MS tutorials aren't the greatest.) Second, polish up on your regular expressions. The best way to complete what you want is probably to parse the file yourself and locate all instances of inline style tags. Then add a right-click menu item and locate the appropriate tag when you need to.

But again, I would start with the basic tutorials. The VS extension API is a bit odd, so you'll probably want to get used to it by doing simple stuff first.

Good luck, you'll need it. :p

EDIT: I know this doesn't answer your question directly, just offering a bit of advice.

VS Extension to manipulate HTML / CSS

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