Strip’em Add-in for Visual Studio 6.0

This article was contributed by
Itay Szekelyetay@writeme.com.

Environment: Windows NT/9x, Visual C++ 6


This Add-in converts the text format of a file when it
is saved in Visual Studio.

This can be very useful when working in a mixed Windows-Unix
environment. In Unix, end of lines in text files are
identified by line feed characters. In Windows – they are
identified by a combination of carriage return and line feed.

This add-in makes sure that files will be saved the way you.
want. When invoked, it opens a dialog box in which you can
select the text mode you need.

Strip'em Dialog

Setup


Copy Stripem.dll to any place you want. A good place
would be under the Microsoft Visual Studio folder at
Common\MSDev98\AddIns



Open Visual Studio and select: Tools | Customize…



Go to the Add-ins and Macro files tab and click on
the Browse button.



Go to the folder to which you copied Stripem.dll and
select it. Make sure the Files of type listbox is on
Add-ins (.dll).



When closing the dialog, a toolbar will appear with
the Strip’em button. Using the customize dialog you
can move this button to any other toolbar (if you
want to).



Pressing the button will open a dialog box in which
you can select the text mode you want to use.

Possible problems


After saving a file, the add-in kicks in and start replacing
carriage returns and line feeds. If the file is opened in
Visual Studio, it will open a dialog box saying that the
file has changed, and will ask if you want to reload it.
This is quite annoying so you can set up Visual Studio to
automatically reload changed files. To do this, select:
Tools | Options | Editor, and check “Automatic reload of
externally modified files”.

This add-in was built with Visual C++ 6.0 with service
pack 3. I haven’t tested it with other versions, so
you can take your chance. I heard from a friend that it
didn’t work with DevStudio/Visual C++ 5, so he downloaded
the source, compiled it and then it worked.



If the add-in doesn’t “remember” its previous settings
between Visual Studio sessions, check the registry for
the following key:



HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0



This is where Visual Studio saves its data and where
the add-in creates its sub-keys. If it doesn’t exist
you may have a Visual Studio setup problems.
If the key exists, it should have the following sub-key:



AddIns\Stripem.DSAddIn.1



This is where the add-in saves its data. If the key
doesn’t exist, create it manually and see if it works.

Version History

  • Version 1.01.0
  • Added a new option: save in Windows mode. Until now
    you could either remove CR characters or do nothing.
    Now you can convert single LF characters to CR+LF
    pairs – convert from Unix to Windows format.


  • Version 1.00.2
  • First release outside my small beta tester comunity.

    Downloads

    Download Strip’em Add-in – 18 Kb
    Download source – 21 Kb

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