A year ago, we built a small addin that allows you to look at your FogBugz cases inside of Visual Studio.  One of the things that bothered me was that if we had written some code that made reference to a bug or a case in the source code, there was no way to have Visual Studio turn that into a link to our FogBugz install.  I spent a week or two looking into how one would do that with a VS Addin, but it became clear that you needed a deep level of understanding into the innards of Visual Studio if you wanted to write something that parsed the text in the editing window and did fun things with it.

I contacted Whole Tomato, a customer of ours, and makers of Visual Assist X.  Visual Assist X is an addin that talks to Visual Studio in a way that I would have needed to do in order to make:

// This fix is because of Case 123

turned into

// This fix is because of Case 123

I don't even remember what IInterface I needed to implement, but it looked like it would take me a month to do something that those guys could have done in a week.  So we talked about and went back and forth on it, and finally a few months ago, they had some free cycles to make it happen.   Behold, SourceLinks.  (It's free and comes bundled with our Visual Studio plugin).

They even one upped me.  Not only can you hyperlink your case comments, you can hyperlink any source code text to wherever you want using pattern matching.  So "Case 123" can link to your FogBugz Case 123, "Customer #123" can link to your internal sales databas, "source //trunk/repo/file.cs" can link to your source control repo.

And then, oddly enough, they wrote an addin for their addin.  The SourceLinks Addin calls back to your service for tooltip messages to display when you hover over that link.  For FogBugz you can hover over the "Case 123" part and a special piece will log into your FogBugz server on the backend using the API and display pertinent info about your case to you.  If you were really daring, they made it possible that you could implement your very own callback plugin for whatever service you wanted (salesforce.com for example could show you customer info when you hovered over a customer name in your source code).   The FogBugz one is built in for you.

I would have though a generic tool like this would have existed long ago, but I never could find anything like it.  Here's my post from October 2005 in a failed attempt to find one.

Let me know if you find other cool uses for the SourceLinks Addin.  It was designed very flexibly to allow you to do pretty much anything (with FogBugz or even some other piece of software).

So thank you Whole Tomato.  You guys rock!