SCF intellisense

Wed, October 31, 2007, 02:59 AM under SideShow
It has been a while since I blogged anything about SideShow but it occurred to me recently that when I was throwing together the SCF XML for my SideShow screencast, I never used the schema to get intellisense for it because I was using the managed API. However, just because you can use the managed API to generate the SCF for you doesn't mean you cannot use the SCF schema to get intellisense and create the SCF that way (and then use the managed API to send it down). All you need is the XSD file and then to use Visual Studio's schema support.

Step 1: Get SCF schema from here. Plug it in as per usual and notice how you get compiler errors.
Step 2: Fix the error you get by changing this <xsd:complexType name="ItemType" mixed="true"> to this <xsd:complexType mixed="true">.
Step 3: At this point you notice that intellisense works great but it allows you to start with any element, and not just with the only legal SCF option which is body. Not being an XSD person I kindly asked the XSD Jedi to refactor the schema so it can only start with the body element – luckily he obliged.
Step 4: So intellisense worked fine at previous step (thanks Dave), but I still wanted to have comments. So I manually populated the schema with comments and now I have a really cool SCF XSD schema with rich intellisense:



Download the xsd here.