Markdown Helper For Visual Studio

About

Use the amazing text-to-HTML tool Markdown to create HTML in Visual Studio.

You can create a markdown file directly in Visual Studio and this tool will output the generated HTML as a file within the project.

I am currently using it to output a partial view for ASP.NET MVC3 for a help/FAQ page.

It allows me to write the page using Markdown and have the generated file used as a partial view without me having to copy and paste from a markdown converter to Visual Studio.

How To

Naming Convention for your markdown files

So the tool can infer what file extension you would like to create you should use the following filename pattern:

filename.[required_extension].md or filename.[required_extension].markdown

examples:

test1.html.md
test1.cshtml.md

produces:

test1.html
test1.cshtml

Enabling the tool

Set the "CustomTool" property on each of your markdown files to "Markdown".

The HTML output will now be automatically created every time you save the markdown source file.

Credits

• A vast majority of the code in this plugin is taken from Steve Potter's excellent LessCssForVisualStudio extension
• The markdown conversion is done using markdownsharp
• Obviously the whole reason for doing this is to use Markdown so all credit to Markdown