The thought of creating a Visual Studio extension really had never crossed my mind until attending the annual Microsoft MVP Summit in 2014 and listening to Mads Kristensen, giving a talk on developing them, which was just the amount of inspiration that I needed at the time, apparently.
I'm a full-stack developer. I spend quite a bit of time architecting the back-ends, the APIs, and all of the other unseen jazz, but the other half of my time is spent on the front-end, including - building user-experiences, waging endless wars with JavaScript quirks and cross-browser issues, and generally making things "prettier" and easier to use.
Glyphfriend is primarily targeted to people like that (full-stack and front-end devs). Glyphs commonly find their place when I'm working on UX, and Glyphfriend certainly saves me quite a few search engine queries when doing so. Based on the following <h4> tag that you are about to read, I'm not the only one.
Glyphfriend reaches 70k+ downloads
At the time of this writing, the extension has been downloaded over 70,000 times!
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That's bonkers! The downloads were fairly steady during the RC phase of Visual Studio 2015, and after release, it really blew up. Visual Studio Update 1 actually included an extension recommendation system that would suggest popular extensions for developers to use. Glyphfriend was included in that group. You can take a guess by reviewing the chart above, exactly when Update 1 was released...
Thanks to all of the folks who continue to use Glyphfriend; those who post any issues they run into, within the GitHub repository; and others who e-mailed me with feature requests. It makes maintaining the project much easier and more enjoyable.
What's Changed in 1.3 and 1.4?
Since the last
post detailing what was going on in Glyphfriend, quite a few things have been happening.
- Added Entypo Library Support
Glyphfriend now supports the Entypo set of glyphs.
- Added Material Design Library Support
Glyphfriend now supports the Material Design library of glyphs; Thanks to @svkekl for this suggestion.
- Updated Font Awesome Glyphs to 4.5.0
Updated Font Awesome to the latest version and added all of the glyphs that were included within the 4.5.0 release.
- Updated Octicons to 3.5.0
Updated Octicons to the latest version and added all of the glyphs that were included within the 3.5.0 release.
- Overhauled Internal Dictionary to Support Redundant Prefixes
Updated how the internal dictionary within the extension is structured to allow for multiple glyph libraries to use the same prefix (e.g. icon-alert in IcoMoon and icon-alert in Entypo).
But wait! There's more.
In addition to the above changes, there's one other thing that I would like to let everyone know. Glyphfriend is now available as a Resharper Extension.
One of the common issues that I have heard (but cannot consistently reproduce) is that Glyphfriend often doesn't work as well as it should when a user is working with Resharper installed. Creating an extension for it had been on my back-log for some time and apparently, Kelby Hunt aka Huntk23 decided to do something about it.
ResharperGlyphfriend is an open-source version of Glyphfriend built as a Resharper Extension that should ensure that Glyphfriend's auto-completion events aren't brushed under the rug of JetBrains Powerhouse extension.
You can find it by simply searching for "Glyphfriend" within the Resharper plug-ins area.
Note
If you use Resharper and don't want to download the plug-in, several users have reported explicitly disabling R#'s HTML autocompletion events, which should allow Visual Studio (and subsequently Glyphfriend) to take over.