BlenX Visual Studio Package
This solution, with several projects, creates a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 plugin which adds support for the "BlenX" language. BlenX is a DSL for the creation of biochemical models, inspired at Beta-binders. The language, for which you can find an introduction here, was created at The University of Trento - Microsoft Research Center for Computational and Systems Biology (CoSBi) by Alessandro Romanel and me, with the contribution of other researchers, during our PhD.
The plugin adds intellisense (syntax highliting, code generation, autocompletion, parameters hints, brace matching and collapsing regions), creation of projects, code snippets, and custom tasks for the "execution" of programs through a stocastich simulator (BetaSIM, also written by Alessandro and me, which is available at CoSBi website), etc. to Visual Studio. It uses Wintellect PowerCollections (inclued, as a DLL) and the Visual Studio Managed Package Framework for Projects MPFProj
I coded this plugin during my Christmas vacation in winter 2009, mostly as an exercise to explore how to use the Visual Studio SDK and extend the VS IDE; since I was working on BlenX, I decided to use it as a test language, for which I had already written a parser.
However, I ended up using MPF (the Managed Package Framework), and therefore I rewrote all the parsing code from scratch (since BetaSIM was written in unmanaged C++). Fortunately, this was a quick job, and made the project self-contained with no additional dependencies on external libraries or programs. All you need to do to compile and try it is have VS 2008 SP1 and its SDK installed.
MPFProj is release under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), a liberal license similar to BSD (link: http://mpfproj.codeplex.com/license)
PowerCollections is released under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) (link: http://powercollections.codeplex.com/license)
The source code is released under the 2-clause FreeBSD license:
Copyright (c) 2009-2012, Lorenzo Dematte' All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
- Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
- Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
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