A while ago I took a moment to reflect on the functionality Spark had accumulated. It seems like the discussion group has been pretty quiet lately. I mentioned that to Tim and he reminded me of something I’d said earlier, “a view engine really only needs to do a handful of things - so much of the work is in framework.” So it might have hit that point where it does what it needs to do and you can call it version 1.

On the other hand if you look at the feedback from people who wouldn’t consider it a viable alternative there’s a definite theme surrounding Visual Studio integration in general and Intellisense in particular. So I decided a few weeks ago to muster up my courage and take another pass at the task of making a Visual Studio integration package to provide a Spark language service.

In an earlier post there was a comment from Pablo Blamirez that provided a really interesting lead with a few of the contained language interfaces. Then earlier last week I had some invaluable assistance from Phil Haack in tracking down some reference material on the subject. And I’m delighted to say all of the ingredients have finally come together, at least in a preliminary fashion.

So let’s see some pictures!

Using Html helper members:

Seeing method parameters and overloads:

Specifying a strongly typed ViewData model:

And a bigger picture with colors and example of Linq Intellisense on collections:

It’s still far from done but getting to this point was a huge milestone.