I'm pleased to announce the release of HLSL Tools for Visual Studio v1.0.
HLSL Tools is a free (and open source) extension for Visual Studio 2013 and 2015 that adds IntelliSense support when editing HLSL shaders.
Since VS2012, Visual Studio has shipped with very basic support for HLSL files - really just syntax highlighting and sometimes-correct automatic formatting. HLSL Tools works with all HLSL versions / shader models, and includes these features:
- Statement completion
- Signature help
- Reference highlighting
- Navigation bar
- Navigate to (Ctrl+,)
- Live syntax and semantic errors
- Go to definition (F12)
- Quick info
- Gray out code excluded by the preprocessor
- HLSL-specific language options
You can download HLSL Tools:
- from within Visual Studio, Tools > Extensions and Updates > Search for "HLSL Tools"
- from the Visual Studio Gallery: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/75ddd3be-6eda-4433-a850-458b51186658
- as source code from the GitHub repo: https://github.com/tgjones/HlslTools
Perhaps of interest to those writing HLSL-based language tools, HLSL Tools includes a handwritten HLSL parser and semantic analyzer, which underpins all the features mentioned above.
Here are some screen captures showing off some of the IntelliSense features:
Statement completion:
Signature help:
Reference highlighting:
Navigation bar:
Navigate to:
Live errors:
Go to definition:
Quick info:
Preprocessor support:
Options:
