Douglas Purdy

I am in the process of writing some “Oslo” demos for a few upcoming external events.  Many of these involve writing custom “modes” for Intellipad for various DSLs and runtimes.

Provided you have the “Oslo” CTP2, you can see the modes available for a given buffer on the right-hand side of the buffer view.

I was going write a post about how to do this, as I think it is one of the most valuable aspects of Intellipad, but then I recalled reading an article that discussed something like this just after PDC.

Lo and behold, my memory was correct.  Codeslower.com has a great article that outlines how to do this in the CTP1 bits.

Briefly scanning the code, it looks like it should work with the CTP2 bits with some straightforward modifications.  

Note that you do not need to do Step 3.3—Create Python Scripts from the post, as we have a drop-down of all the available modes now.

I don’t recall the mode dropdown being in the PDC bits, but it has been so long now and I have seen so many builds of Intellipad that I could be mistaken.

Speaking of which, be on the look out at for us to make the development of these DSL modes even easier via the same declarative mechanisms we use for the rest of “Oslo”.

We already do this in the internal builds of Intellipad;  we are just trying to figure out how quickly we can get it out to you.

In the meantime, the process of writing a mode is so simple right now that if you are .Net developer, there is no reason for you not to experiment with writing your own DSLs and Intellipad.

Download the CTP today, write some code and tell us about it.