Memeful Comments

It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words. An animated GIF is probably worth even more. This Visual Studio extension enables displaying images, including animated GIFs, alongside your code to enhance explanations with visuals or simply to express your reaction to the code. You can easily show your co-workers, with only a comment line, how you facepalmed yourself when you saw what they checked in recently.

The supported languages are C#, C, C++, F#, VB.NET, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python.

To display an image, either from the web or your local disk, include a tag in the source code comments. Use the url or src attribute to specify its location and optionally scale to indicate a scaling factor.

Example

class Sorting
{
   /// <summary>
   /// Implements the radix sort algorithm.
   /// </summary>
   /// <image url="https://ds055uzetaobb.cloudfront.net/image_optimizer/22630368cbc032ea43967b2610e73ded399e22a4.png" scale="0.5" />
   static void Radix(int[] arr)
   {
   }
}

Visual Studio environment variables $(SolutionDir) and $(ProjectDir) can be used in URLs.

Example

class Sorting
{
   // <image url="$(ProjectDir)Images\radix.png" scale="0.5" />
   static void Radix(int[] arr)
   {
   }
}

Recommendation

Use images and especially animated GIFs judiciously! A larger number of images in a document might decrease the responsiveness of the editor.

Credits

Special thanks to Shmueli Englard for this contribution to the project.

Release Notes

v1.4

• support for Visual Studio 2019
• support for Python
• support for environment variables $(SolutionDir) and $(ProjectDir)
• fixed bug with images from collapsed blocks still showing

v1.3

• reloading images if they change
• performance improvements and bug fixes

v1.2

• fixed problem with Visual Studio hanging because of the extension
• use invariant culture to parse the scale value

v1.1

• support for paths relative to the document
• performance improvements
• open sourced the extension to GitHub

v1.0

• the first public release
• support for C#, C, C++, F#, VB.NET, JavaScrip, Typescript
• support for images from the web or the local disk
• support for scaling the images