tomasr / BetterXml

VS2010 extension to improve the XML editor experience

BetterXml VS2010 Extension

This is a sample extension for Visual Studio 2010 that improves the XML editing experience.

Syntax Highlighting

1. Highlighting XML closing tags with a format different from opening tags. Adjust the "XML Closing Tag" classification format to configure it.

2. Highlighting XML prefixes on attributes and tags with a new format, configured using the "XML Prefix" classification format.

Both features are supported on XML, XAML and HTML documents.

Namespace Tooltips

Tooltips showing the namepace URI associated with a prefix when you hover the mouse over the prefix.

This can be a bit slow at times because right now it requires parsing the document partially. This feature is only supported for XML and XAML documents.

Matching Element Tags

When the caret is over an XML element, the element opening and closing tags will be highlighted.

Installation

1. Install the Visual Studio 2010 SDK. You'll need it for building custom extensions.
2. Open the solution in Visual Studio 2010 and build it.
3. Close all open VS2010 instances.
4. Using Windows Explorer, navigate to the project's output folder and double click on the BetterXml.vsix generated.

That's it!