RDL file color coding in Visual Studio 2005

Is there a way to configure visual studio 2005 to display RDL files in "code view" with proper color coding and intellisense? Right now, it's just displaying the xml in plain black and white and Visual studio is no better than notepad at this point. It seems silly that VS2005 forces you to view a text file in a designer when the designer is always reformatting and breaking the underlying xml. Thanks

[404 byte] By [joebreese] at [2008-1-10]

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# 1

Hi,

It is not possible via Visual Studio .NET. As mentioned, developers are somewhat forced to use the designer.

NOTE: I didn't use any of the other tools yet but just to mention that Visual Studio .NET is not the only RDL editor

Greetz,

Geert

Geert Verhoeven
Consultant @ Ausy Belgium

My Personal Blog

GeertVerhoeven at 2007-10-3 >

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# 2

Actually I found that you can view the RDL with color coding by going to:

Tools - Options - Text Editor - File Extensions

Add an entry for RDL to use the XML editor. The downside is that all RDL is edited as XML and no designer support is enabled. There has to be a way to use the designer as VS2005 specifies and then also associate the RDL extension to color code the text when one selects "code view".

joebreese at 2007-10-3 >

# 3

I used that same solution, but then like you did, realized that you can't use the designer anymore. It's a shame Microsoft didn't think of this. I wish there was some other solution.

For now all I can recommend is open the .rdl in some other xml editor and don't have that entry for .rdl to use the XML editor in VS.

What I actually do now is if I have to do a lot with the .rdl source is I add that entry, do the editing, and then remove it, but as you can imagine, that's extremely inconvenient.

Liron231 at 2007-10-3 >

# 4

You can add an external tool in the Tools->External Tools... VS menu.

For example, if you want to add XmlMarker (http://symbolclick.com/), specify the following values:

Title: XmlMarker
Command: C:\Program Files\XML Marker\xmlmarker.exe
Arguments: $(ItemPath)

After you save the file, don't forget to reload RDL in the designer.

Ruslan Urban at 2008-1-18 >

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