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I've written a basic LanguageService extension for Visual Studio 2008 for my studio's proprietary scripting language. It works perfectly fine, and I've implemented a basic symbol table to keep track of script definitions and calls allowing for goto definition functionality.

The problem I've run into is that I only know how to parse the current active view, and I'd like to scan the entire solution's contents so that the user can goto the definition of a script defined in a file they have yet to open and have parsed. I've figured out how to generate a list of all files in the solution, but now I need to create a new Microsoft.VisualStudio.Package.Source which requires a Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextManager.Interop.IVsTextLines and I have no idea how to create a new one based off of the file I have.

Maybe I'm going about the problem the wrong way and someone can point me towards a better way to cause a file to be parsed by the LanguageService.

Regards, Colin

ColinCren
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1 Answers1

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Poking around I found that the reason Visual Studio needs a new Source is that it's keeping an internal list of them, and they're like the view into the text file held by the editor.

I came to the conclusion that files that are closed do not need IVsTextLines or to be entered into the VS internal list of Source files because I'm not doing any operations directly on them, all I care about in this case is to build a table of symbols and their corresponding TextSpan. So instead I created a new API for my parser that just took in a string and built my AST instead of grabbing the text from a ParseRequest, and only worried about specific types of symbols I needed to record. I then pushed this into a BackgroundWorker.

So I guess I was going about the problem in the wrong way. Although it does seem weird I can't just trigger a file to be opened into the Source list.

Interestingly I asked this question to Microsoft on their support forums and they advised me I had to purchase some service and support plan for them to answer my question.

ColinCren
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