RTI Presents IDL Syntax Highlighter: Extending the Possibilities of Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is extremely popular with developers, including a lot of us here at RTI. However, DDS developers have been missing one useful feature. Specifically, being able to correctly highlight data types. This seemed like a feature many people have wanted for a long time, but has so far been pretty much unavailable in any commercial or open source offering. Now, all of that has changed! 

We’re excited to announce the first release of an open source Visual Studio Code syntax highlighter for Object Management Group^® (OMG^®) IDL. We call it IDL Syntax Highlighter, and it’s available for download right now.

This unique new Visual Studio Code extension provides a syntax highlighter that is specific to OMG IDL. And this is great news for RTI Connext^® DDS users, because IDL Syntax Highlighter now makes it not only possible, but also easy for you to define your Connext DDS data types by adding color-coding, including:

• Basic types, such as octet, int32, and boolean
• Constructed types, such as struct and union
• Annotations, such as @key, and more!
  
  

You can see an example in the following code:

This Visual Studio Code extension is available through the Visual Studio Marketplace, or directly available inside of Visual Studio Code. Give it a try — we think you’ll love it as much as we do!

About the author

Rose Wahlin is a Principal Software Engineer at Real-Time Innovations. She has over 20 years of experience in writing customer-focused applications and working with embedded software, C++, Java and middleware. Rose graduated from UC Santa Cruz.