NShader 1.1, hlsl, glsl, cg syntax coloring for Visual Studio 2008 & 2010

I have recently released NShader 1.1 which adds support for Visual Studio 2010 as well as bugfixes for hlsl/glsl syntax highlighting.

While this plugin is quite cool to add a basic syntax highlighting for shader languages, It lacks intellisense/completion/error markers to improve the editor experience. I didn't have time to add such a functionality in this release as... I don't really have too much time dedicated to this project... and well, I have so much to learn from effectively practicing a lot more shader languages that I'm fine with this basic syntax highlighting! ;) Is it a huge task to add intellisense? It depends, but concretely, I need to implement for each shading language a full grammar/lexer parser in order to provide a reliable intellisense. Of course, a very basic intellisense would be feasible without this, but I would rather not to use an annoying/unreliable intellisense popup.

Building .fx hlsl files with a Custom Build Rule under Visual Studio 2008

It's sometimes convenient to be able to compile directly a .fx file under a VS C++ project. NShader provides a nice way to highlight your code, but it's not able (yet, not sure I will update it up to this feature) to compile anything or to display syntax errors.

Hopefully, there is a simple workaround, avoiding to develop your own custom building task : using a custom build rule. Unfortunately, I was able to find one a while ago on Internet, but I lost it, and if I remember, it was lacking some features (like showing all available profiles)... So I decided yesterday to implement my own building rules files, leveraging on the existing .asm rules files that is shipped with Visual Studio, and It was surprisingly easy to write it.

To add this custom building rules to VS, follow these instructions: