LINQPad: Dump with Syntax Highlighting

c# Mar 21, 2015

LINQPad is where I breathe and eat in a typical day at work. I use a lot of extension methods inside that makes my life easy. I decided to share some of the most useful ones here when I get some time to write. Most of them were found online that can be found even now but I thought It'd be helpful if all of them had been on one place and I could just copy them all at the first place! This is the post number 1 of [I don't know how many I'd write] article series.

As the title implies, it is the same old beloved Dump method with some intelligence in it. Take a piece of code in a string, call this method by specifying the language type in the language parameter. Violah! the preview pan shows the code with syntax highlighting.

Just copy the following method into your MyExtensions class, then you will get DumpWithSyntaxHightlighting alongside the regular Dump

public static string DumpWithSyntaxHightlighting(this string code, SyntaxLanguageStyle language = SyntaxLanguageStyle.XML, string panelTitle = null)
{
    if(panelTitle == null)
        panelTitle = Enum.GetName(typeof(SyntaxLanguageStyle), language) + "Result";
		
    PanelManager.DisplaySyntaxColoredText(code, language, panelTitle);
    return code;
}

an example usage would be

File.ReadAllText(@"C:\some-xml.xml")
    .DumpWithSyntaxHightlighting(SyntaxLanguageStyle.XML)

Mohammad Mustakim Ali

I'm a Software Engineer living in London, UK. My passion is to make *very fast* software with great user experience and I have just got little better on this than I was yesterday.