Disable for non-MIDL3 IDL files

[talagrand]

Fantastic extension Alex, it's a huge productivity boost.

My project has a mix of MIDL3 and older IDL files. While it's unreasonable to support all the variations of IDL, I wonder if the extension could disable itself on non-MIDL3 files. Currently, the "Problems" pane is polluted with dozens of expected errors as a result.

I don't know if it's super simple to make the difference. In my case, I observe that all non-MIDL3 files either start with:

[uuid(...)]
interface ...

or

cpp_quote("#pragma once")

Or maybe project settings could enable/disable this extension on individual files/directories.

[asklar]

Thanks glad you found it useful @talagrand :)
MIDL3 is a superset of older IDL versions so I think either:

• need a way to disable the extension per file
• need to extend the grammar to accept older MIDL
• need a way to configure the MIDL version per file

The second one is kind of icky because ideally we want to encourage MIDL 3 and discourage older syntax. I'd need to investigate if there is a way for an extension to disable itself on a particular file. It probably needs the user to keep a mapping of IDL files for a project...but the extension doesn't need to operate on a project per se, it can operate on loose IDL files... so maybe a "tag comment" like // disable-midl3-extension at the beginning or something like that...
Thoughts?

[talagrand]

Thanks Alex! It might be worth taking a look at how JSON Schema is supported in VSCode. JSON Schema unfortunately has no mapping from JSON file back to the underlying schema, so VSCode supports both of your suggestions - an in-file marker as well as a global mapping: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/json#_mapping-in-the-json

In my specific case the IDLs are come from SDK-like entities so a mapping-style mechanism would be preferrable but that's probably the less common need compared to the tag-based approach.