A Visual Studio extension that provides enhanced support for editing High Level Shading Language (HLSL) files and Unity ShaderLab shaders. Shader Tools works with both Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017.

Download the extension at the VS Gallery or get the nightly build.

See the changelog for changes and roadmap.

Visual Studio itself includes basic support for editing HLSL files - and, with Visual Studio Tools for Unity installed, it also includes basic support for editing Unity shaders.

In addition to those basic features, Shader Tools for Visual Studio includes many more navigational and editing features:

There are more features on the roadmap.

Just start typing, and Shader Tools will show you a list of the available symbols (variables, functions, etc.) at that location. You can manually trigger this with the usual shortcuts: Ctrl+J, Ctrl+Space, etc.

Signature help (a.k.a. parameter info) shows you all the overloads for a function call, along with information (from MSDN) about the function, its parameters, and return types. Typing an open parenthesis will trigger statement completion, as will the standard Ctrl+Shift+Space shortcut. Signature help is available for all HLSL functions and methods, including the older tex2D-style texture sampling functions, and the newer Texture2D.Sample-style methods.

Placing the cursor within a symbol (local variable, function name, etc.) will cause all references to that symbol to be highlighted. Navigate between references using Ctrl+Shift+Up and Ctrl+Shift+Down.

Shader Tools supports Visual Studio's Navigate To feature. Activate it with Ctrl+,, and start typing the name of the variable, function, or other symbol that you want to find.

Shader Tools shows you syntax and semantic errors immediately. No need to wait till compilation! Errors are shown as squigglies and in the error list.

Press F12 to go to a symbol definition. Go to definition works for variables, fields, functions, classes, macros, and more.

Hover over almost anything (variable, field, function call, macro, semantic, type, etc.) to see a Quick Info tooltip.

Shader Tools evaluates preprocessor directives as it parses your HLSL code, and grays out excluded code. If you want to make a code block visible to, or hidden from, Shader Tools, use the __INTELLISENSE__ macro:

Configure HLSL- and ShaderLab-specific IntelliSense and formatting options. If you really want to, you can disable IntelliSense altogether and just use Shader Tools' other features. You can also set HLSL- and ShaderLab-specific highlighting colours in Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors.

Shader Tools includes handwritten parsers for HLSL and ShaderLab. It initially used an ANTLR lexer and parser, but the handwritten version was faster, and offered better error recovery.

Shader Tools has a reasonable test suite - although it can certainly be improved. Amongst more granular tests, it includes a suite of 433 shaders, including all of the shaders from the DirectX and Nvidia SDKs, and Unity's built-in shaders. If you want to contribute gnarly source files that push HLSL and ShaderLab to its limit, that would be great!

Inspired by Roslyn, Shader Tools includes a syntax visualizer for HLSL source files. It's primarily of interest to Shader Tools developers, but may be of interest to language nerds, so it's included in the main extension. Open it using View > Other Windows > HLSL Syntax Visualizer.

You can ask questions in our Gitter room. If you find a bug or want to request a feature, create an issue here . You can find me on Twitter at @_tim_jones_ and I tweet about Shader Tools using the #shadertools hashtag.

Contributions are always welcome. Please read the contributing guide first.

• @tgjones

• Much of the code structure, and some of the actual code, comes from Roslyn.
• NQuery-vnext is a nice example of a simplified Roslyn-style API, and Shader Tools borrows some of its ideas and code.
• Node.js Tools for Visual Studio and Python Tools for Visual Studio are amongst the best examples of how to build a language service for Visual Studio, and were a great help.
• ScriptSharp is one of the older open-source .NET-related compilers, and is still a great example of how to structure a compiler.
• LangSvcV2 includes many nice abstractions for some of the more complicated parts of Visual Studio's language service support.