Source Code Reader - Browse source code online

Today we're featuring Source Code Reader, a web application that let's your effortlessly browse C# code on GitHub without having to clone the repository and fire up Visual Studio. We talked to Rajeesh, the creator of Source Code Reader.

Tell us a little bit about Source Code Reader

Source Code Reader is a web application which basically allows a user to open a publically hosted .NET C# project on Github and navigate through the code seamlessly. It allows a user to navigate directly to the implementation code from the calling code with single click (similar to the Go To Definition feature available in Microsoft Visual Studio).

Source code hosting providers like GitHub, Bitbucket, CodePlex and Google Code only provide provide basic file browsing capabilities. Source Code Reader does much more than files browsing; it understands the semantics of the code to give superior code navigation functionality.

Source Code Reader screenshot

What inspired you to build Source Code Reader?

One day I was going through the RavenDB source code hosted on Github and it was really difficult to find out how a method or class is implemented when looking at the calling code. The only way was to manually go through all the folders to find the implementation. It's not a big problem for simple projects but for project like RavenDB it is a daunting task. Source Code Reader solves this problem.

What technologies are you using

Source Code Reader is an ASP.NET MVC 4 single page application. Other technologies include:

What's in store for the future?

Lots of things are on my list, here are some:

  • Better syntax highlighting
  • Support for VB.NET
  • Supporting other source code hosting providers like Bitbucket, Google Code and CodeOlex
  • Support for other languages (longer term)

If you want to help make this happen, then feel free to pitch in – Source Code Reader is open source and I'd love to get contributions.

Tuesday, 7 August 2012

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