As the name says, the Line Highlighter feature visually indicates the current line in the Visual Studio code editor. Such a visual line indication allows you to quickly find where the tiny flashing text caret is. This is especially valuable for large screen resolutions. This is what it looks like:
There are several project item wizards made for simplifying the DXCore visual adornments creation process:
The Visual Studio 2010 IDE shell has been rewritten using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), in other words, it has a completely different code editor based on the new WPF technology. Earlier versions of DXCore used GDI and Win32 API calls to paint the inside code editor before Visual Studio 2010 release, and would not work inside the new code editor. To bring painting support to Visual Studio 2010 and leave the support of previous Visual Studio versions, DXCore has been also rewritten using the new painting abstraction layer, which has a split code base for different platforms (WPF, GDI). This abstraction layer is called the “Adornments” architecture. This architecture allows having a single code base for all versions of Visual Studio which helps to maintain both graphic platforms at once and have independent painting, non-dependant on the version of IDE used.
Good code style suggests limiting the length of a code line to 80 characters, and only 70 characters for indented code examples to be used in documentation. The Right Margin Line helps you to visually indicate the specified line length. It doesn’t prevent typing to the right of it, but lets you to identify and break long expressions over multiple lines.
The Comment Painter feature draws a bubble icon over the comment “//” symbols in CSharp, or “ ‘ ” (single quote) in Visual Basic. The source code of this feature shows how to paint bitmaps on the code editor. If the comment is active (e.g. text caret is located inside the comment) then no icon is drawn, allowing you edit the comment.
CodeRush can paint region directives (#region, #endregion) in a different way than Visual Studio, to reduce the visual noise associated with these directives when the region is expanded. Collapsed regions can also be painted in a different color, according to your preference. If your code is full of regions, the Region Painting visual feature will definitely help you to concentrate and focus on the code blocks instead of insignificant stuff.
Structural Highlighting helps you visually navigate the structure of the code. Matching delimiters are connected with low-contrast lines (you can configure the color of the line for each type of code block individually) that are easy to read when this information is important, and easy to ignore when your mind is on the code. For example, see the vertical and horizontal lines in this code sample: