With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft have made it easier than ever for third-party developers to create their own extensions. So I thought I’d brush up my C# skills by creating an extension that provides preliminary support for the Cobra programming language. This first version adds syntax highlighting; hopefully more features will be added over time1.

Here is a video that gives an overview of the extension:

If you just want to download and use the extension, it is available from the Visual Studio Gallery. The easiest way to download and install it is to search for it from the Extension Manager in Visual Studio itself.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to inspect / improve / hack the source code then I’ve made it available on GitHub.

I’d be interested to know what people think. Drop me a line if you have any comments or suggestions for improvement.

Have fun! Matthew

1The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that I created this extension using a trial version of Visual Studio 2010. I don’t have a full version, so I might have to pass the development baton on to other developers going forward, but I hope this forms a reasonable basis for a more fully featured Cobra environment within Visual Studio.