March 23, 2025

Contextive - import glossaries, define metadata, and more!

Hi there,

You're receiving this email because you subscribed to updates about Contextive quite a while ago - if it's no longer relevant to you please feel free to unsubscribe!

Unfortunately 2024 was a pretty slow year for Contextive, but I'm happy to share that 2025 has seen a flurry of long-awaited changes with some big news coming soon!

Some of the most exciting changes are:

• A brand new documentation site with rich examples and usage patterns.
• the old .contextive/definitions.yml file is deprecated - it's now recommended to put your glossaries closer to the code they represent, in a more discoverable %module%.glossary.yml file. (v1.15.0)
• You can now import other glossary files - from either local relative paths, or remote URLs, offering more flexibility for where your glossaries are authored. (v1.16.0)
• You can now define metadata on contexts or on terms which will get rendered into the hover documentation. (v1.16.0)
  • Use cases for metadata include:
    • Noting which team owns a context
    • Linking out to a wiki with more detailed info on contexts or terms
    • Indicating the status of a term definition (draft, or approved)

If you get a chance to try these new features out, your feedback is very welcome! Either reply to this email or submit a github issue or discussion.

For more details, see the full changelog on the docs site.

IDE Support

While VsCode is still the best supported IDE, JetBrains is making great progress on offering a rich Language Server capability in the IntelliJ platform. If you're curious about where that's up to, I did a talk at their plugin developers conference exploring how Contextive is built and a wishlist for the future.

Unfortunately Visual Studio (2022+) is still challenging. Language Server support is very limited, such that even first-class extensions (such as Roslyn) have to use hidden undocumented features. Known issues affecting Contextive are tracked in github, and each includes a link to the Visual Studio Developer Community forum - votes on that forum do affect MS prioritisation, so if any matter to you, please upvote!

Conferences

I'll be at a few conferences over the next few months - if you're around at any of them, come and say hi! All the talks include a demo or at least a reference to Contextive :)

• NDC Melbourne - April/May
• DDD Europe - June
• Agile on the Beach (UK) - July

And speaking of conferences, I'm thrilled that Contextive is helping to make them happen by sponsoring a few this year - if you're at either of these you'll see a Contextive flyer in the goodie bag:

• ExploreDDD - April, USA
• DDD Europe - June, Belgium

Yours in better terminology documentation,

Chris Simon