If you are writing code for a while now then by now you must have a lot of code snippets which you will be using in your application development, and you use them because they save a lot of development time. At this moment we have now a huge collection of code snippets which includes functions, classes, extension methods and functions that we have extracted from different open source applications.

As we were progressing towards building an application in WPF which helps us managing all our code, a thought ran into our mind that it would be good if we could use syntax highlighting in the code. As usual we began my search to find a control in WPF which supports syntax highlighting and what we found, We were and we are at present satisfied. The control called AvalonEdit is a part of the free IDE called SharpDevelop for C# and VB.NET and Boo projects.

Languages support by the control:
- ASP/XHTML
- HTML
- JavaScript
- XML
- XMLDoc
- VB.NET
- C#
- C++
- Coco
- Java
- PHP
- Patch
- Boo
- TeX
- Custom Highlighting



After adding the reference in your project, add below XAML code on the window where you have your code window.



At line 4, we will use custom mapping (because it is a third-party control) so we can use the control in our project. At line 7, I have used TextEditor class of the AvalonEdit namespace. The font name and size is the same as of the source code text editor in Visual Studio 2010.

To get the control working with least configuration set some namespaces on the top, and two lines of code on window load for syntax highlighting and to show line numbers respectively.

Namespaces:


Window_Loaded:


If you wish to change the language, then just change the name of the language which is passed as a parameter in the GetDefinition method. The code in the Window_Loaded method will allow you to set syntax highlighting specifically for C#, pretty simple but not very useful. Check out the other way where the text editor will load the file and by reading the file extension, it will set the syntax highlighting. Above method will be useful if the user wants to set syntax highlighting of his choice. But if you want to detect the language and get the syntax highlighting automatically, then use the below code.


 The first line of code will Load the file and the second file will first get the extension of the file loaded, set the instance of the HighlightingManager class and in the end set the syntax highlighting. This is what we got in the end (We are using the second way to load the file). 


Note: To make sure that the second method work, you need to make sure that the file should have a language extension like .cs for C#, cpp for C++, xml for XML files etc. AvalonEdit is an open source code, so you can play around with it and can have your own customizations. There are lots of in-built configurations that you can do to set up your syntax highlighting control. I strongly recommend you to download the below files and take a look at the sample application.     

Everybody knows Razor is the new view engine ASP.NET Web Pages, so we thought we could write about some Razor syntax you may not be aware of. The three methods we’ll be focusing on today are RenderBody, RenderPage and RenderSection. You’ll need to understand how each of these work if you want to get know the Razor syntax intimately. This code also works in WebMatrix if you're using it.

Before moving on, you need to download ASP.NET MVC 3. Click here to download and install them using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

Open studio 2010 and create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Application (Razor) project. Now it's time to start coding! we’ll begin with the RenderBody method.

RenderBody

The RenderBody method resides in the master page, or in Razor this is commonly referred to as the Layout page. There can only be one RenderBody method per Layout page. If you’re from Web Forms world, the easiest way to think of RenderBody is it’s like the ContentPlaceHolder server control. The RenderBody method indicates where view templates that are based on this master layout file should “fill in” the body content.



RenderPage

Layout pages can also contain content that can be filled by other pages on disk. This is achieved by using the RenderPage method. This method takes either one or two parameters. The first is the physical location of the file, the second is an optional array of objects that can be passed into the page. Add a new cshtml file to the Shared folder and call it _Header.cshtml. We've prefixed this file with an underscore because we don't want this file to be called outside of RenderPage. By default, ASP.NET will not serve pages beginning with an underscore. Here's the code we’re adding to the _Header.cshtml page.

<h1>Header Here</h1>

And to use this in the layout, it's as easy as this.



RenderSection

Layout pages also have the concept of sections. A layout page can only contain one RenderBody method, but can have multiple sections. To create a section you use the RenderSection method. The difference between RenderSection and RenderPage is RenderPage reads the content from a file, whereas RenderSection runs code blocks you define in your content pages. The following code illustrates how to render a footer section.


RenderSection expects one parameter and that is the name of the section. If you don’t provide that, an exception will be thrown. Views can add data to sections by using the following code.


If you ran the website now it’ll run without error. If on the other hand you don’t include the section footer in the view, you’ll get an error.


That’s because by default, sections are mandatory. To make sections optional, just add the second parameter, which is a Boolean value.


Now things will run just fine.

These three methods you will use time and time again when you're using the Razor view engine. This code works both for ASP.NET MVC 3 and also WebMatrix. Have fun!