fleeting fancies

Arnold Matusz’s created a great live writer plugin that uses the excellent syntax highlighter from Alex Gorbatchev. Great Stuff!!

sample:

        public object Lookup(string tblName, string returnField, string where)
        {
            SqlCommand s = new SqlCommand();
            s.Connection = conn;
            s.CommandText = "SELECT " + returnField + " FROM " + tblName + " WHERE " + where;
            return (object) s.ExecuteScalar();
        }

hmm, it doesn’t look very nice inside writer. let’s see what it looks like published.

Update: Looks like the syntax highlighting won’t show up inside live writer itself. 

How it works: The code is put inside a pre (preformatted text) tag and a css class attribute is added to it. The class specifies what language syntax highlighting to use. For example, to get the C# highlighting above, you would use class="brush: csharp;". You can find style brushes for most languages in use today. You can create a custom one if there’s not one for your language. The plugin for live writer from Arnold takes care of putting the correct class.

To get everything working, I ended up modifying the PageTemplate.ascx file for this skin to add the link tags to the required javascript files. There must be some better way to do this because if I decide to change skins, then I will lose all the syntax highlighting.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shCore.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shBrushCpp.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shBrushCss.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shBrushJava.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shBrushJScript.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shBrushPhp.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shBrushPlain.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shBrushSql.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shBrushVb.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/shBrushXml.js"></script>
	<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/styles/shCore.css"/>
	<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/styles/shThemeDefault.css"/>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	    SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://nithinthomas.com/syntax/scripts/clipboard.swf';
		SyntaxHighlighter.all();
	</script>

It might probably help to post the javascript files on google code and link to them instead.