Syntaxhighlighter

I’ve tried a lot of tools and addons to use syntax highlighting on my weblog and BloggingAbout.NET in general. I’ve fallen in love with two of them.

• CopySourceAsHtml by Colin Coller
• SyntaxHighlighter by Alex Gorbatchev

The first I use to use for my weblog. But this causes a lot of markup within the code and it can never be changed later on. I still use CopySourceAsHtml for posting in PowerPoint, Word and other tools though. Simply because it’s really, really good and easy to use from within Visual Studio.

SyntaxHighlighter is a set of Javascript that gives your code its color after it’s being displayed, ie. when the page has loaded. The code itself is rendered within <pre> tags and has no specific markup in HTML for the coloring. This makes the highlighting a bit slower, but with the additional benefits that there’s no extensive markup in the code, that the coloring libraries can be updated. Additionally a popup window is displayed for easily copying the code and some other useful buttons.

For installation I’ll redirect you to the official site.

SyntaxHighlighter plugin for Windows Live Writer : PreCode
What makes my life especially easy as a blogger, is this plugin called "PreCode". The plugin fits nicely into Windows Live Writer and with a popup window, a paste and a fix indentation you have some new code layed out on your weblog. Could not be any easier.

This is the end result:

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Hello world");
            }
        }
    }
}