A little while back, Jeff Wilcox wrote an awesome syntax highlighter (blog post here). It enables you to display code in Silverlight with similar syntax highlighting that we know and love from Visual Studio. This is really useful if you want to display some code samples inside your Silverlight application.

However it had one major feature missing: You couldn’t select and copy the code. And what good are code samples if you can’t do that (unless you’re the patient type who likes typing a lot). Vladimir Horbovanu had commented that he had modified the sample to be built on MVVM and added the option of selecting and even editing the text. However, this only supported C# and not VB, JS, Xaml, C++ and Xml as the original sample did, and there were a few issues with getting the text to properly align. However the “trick” he applied was simple but clever: Put a TextBox on top of the existing control, and make it transparent.

So I basically took Jeff’ awesome library, modified the template a bit, bound a TextBox with transparent text to the source code and put it on top of the existing template parts, tweaked the TextBox template to properly align and voila: The SyntaxHighlightingTextBlock is now a SyntaxHighlightingTextBox. I also added a couple of properties to the control to quickly get the selected text, set readonly state etc.

Jeff deserves most of the credit for this one, and Vladimir the rest for the neat TextBox trick. All I did was put it together, clean it up a bit and fix a couple of bugs in the highlighter. Expect to see this used in the next release of our SDK.

You can get the source here, and view the sample app here.

The library still only requires Silverlight 3, however the demo app uses Silverlight 4’ right-click feature for the context menu.

Update: Vlad took this sample further and improved rendering performance when editing larger amounts of code. See his updated blogpost here: http://www.vladhorby.com/blog/post/2010/11/01/code-editor-control-with-syntax-highlighting-for-silverlight-available.aspx
Isn't it great how the .NET community works together on building some useful stuff? Thanks Vlad!