Glossary – Visual Studio Extension

I recently release the latest version of my extension “Glossary” for Visual Studio 2022. You can get Glossary from the Visual Studio Marketplace or from the extension manager inside Visual Studio.

Glossary is a tool that helps you keep track of common phrases, typical acronyms or abbreviations used in your project. I often realize that using project specific acronyms is the normal behavior in daily business. Unfortunately every new team member or any other colleague may not get the meaning of the acronym or worst, he believes to understand but actually has a totally different knowing about that acronym/abbreviation in his mind. Miscommunication is inevitable.

To put all your team mates on the same communication level, install Glossary in Visual Studio.

After restarting Visual Studio, you’ll find a new tool window called “Glossary” in the “View” menu.

Opening the tool window will show up the glossary. In the upper part of the tool window, you can edit the acronym and the explanation of the acronym.

Glossary will create an XML file inside of your solution folder named solution.glossay.xml. The XML file is easy to understand, eventually it contains a list of key-value pairs. For example, the above screenshot is stored in the following XML file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Data xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  xmlns="http://www.beranek.de/Glossar.xsd">
	<Items Label="AES" 
	  Description="Advanced Encryption Standard" />
	<Items Label="API" 
	  Description="Application Programming Interface" />
	<Items Label="GCD" 
	  Description="Greatest Common Denominator" />
	<Items Label="MVC" 
	  Description="Model View Controller" />
	<Items Label="MVVM" 
	  Description="Model View ViewModel" />
	<Items Label="PM" 
	  Description="Product Management" />
	<Items Label="TDD" 
	  Description="Test Driven Development" />
	<Items Label="UT" 
	  Description="Unit Test" />
</Data>

Adding the glossary file to your source-control makes the stored data available to all your team members working within the same project. So it’s super easy to distribute your acronyms and abbreviations across your team and keep communication up to date.

Happy coding 😊