Thursday, May 15, 2008

Outlining/collapsing Comments in VS2005/VS2008

A minor issue but still it might bother you while working with your code. The C# editor (and possibly others) of Visual Studio offers collapsing and expanding classes name spaces, methods, blocks, etc. And comments. Most of the times this works as expected. But then it doesn't work for comments at the beginning of a file. Then it works often, and sometimes it doesn't. I can't reproduce it but it usually doesn't work when I want to collapse the comment, and it works if I don't need to collapse. Why is this annoying? Well at the beginning of files by default I add my company's copyright statement. It has about 10 lines. Not much but if you consider that generally I can see about 30 lines on my laptop display then it basically means that 33% of the real estate on the screen is consumed by a piece of text that has no value to me while editing code (rather than comments). You still think 10 lines is not much? If you really want to optimize the use of your time you are happy about every single contribution. A mouse click here, a key press there, some scrolling, waiting time, etc. it all adds up. I don't know whether this exists in other versions as well. I have observed the issue in both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. It's not really an issue; more like a nuisance. So this is another item I'd like to ask to get fixed. Just in case someone from Redmond is ready this. The workaround I'm using is to surround those comments with #region/#endregion. This can be reliably collapse expanded even at the beginning of a source file.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've had difficulty getting some comments to automatically collapse too; like you said, it seems to only happen when you need it collapsed.

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