Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 2, Master the Editor

#12 Customize Syntax Coloring

HACK

steps. First, you need to create a file named usertype.dat. This is a simple text

file that contains all of the words that you want to be colored as keywords.

Start by creating a new text file in your favorite text editor, add the word

DateTime to the top line of that file, then save that file with the name of

usertype and the extension of .dat. Here is what your file should look like:

DateTime

Next, copy this file to the following directory: <Visual Studio Directory>\

Common7\IDE (for example, C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

2003\Common7\IDE).

Before Visual Studio will read this file, you need to restart the IDE; after the

restart, you can open up a C++ source code file, and you should see

DateTime colored as a keyword. You can then add additional keywords, each

on its own line, and the IDE will pick these words up and treat them as key-

words. Customizing the words that are colored is a great way to get confir-

mation that you typed the correct word and also increases the readability of

your code.

Hacking the Hack

If you wanted all of your classes to be colored, it would take a quite a bit of

time to add all of them to the usertype.dat file. Steve King has written a nice

add-in that will look through your entire solution, add all of your classes to

a temporary usertype.dat file, then load that file with Visual Studio. ...