Major Whidbey complaint (!)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lecture Snoddddgrass
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L

Lecture Snoddddgrass

I know that this thing is pre-beta, so I'm hoping there's still time for
you to change the defaults for text formatting options in the IDE (C#
section).

One of my least favorite things about installing a Microsoft product,
take MS Word for example, is turning *off* all of the features that are on
by default [office assistance, auto-correct, etc]. These features are great
if you need them. If you don't need them, they just make the product harder
to use. At least with Word, I have the option to nix Office Assistant at
install-time and turn off auto-correct by unchecking a series of checkboxes.

...but Whidbey is much worse. You (MSFT) have turned on so many nonsense
auto-formatting features *by default* that the simple act of writing code
becomes a major chore because the user has to manually "undo" the
autoformats of Visual Studio. I can't type a single line of code (not a
for/foreach, nor even a simple method call) without VS adding spaces, line
breaks, indents, etc. to my code. These things should all be turned OFF by
default. It wouldn't be so bad if the user could quickly turn this stuff off
as in VS2003, but you've added *SO MANY FRIGGIN AUTO-FORMAT OPTIONS* -- some
of which are buried in other FOLDERs full of auto-format options, that it
becomes a real pain to bring a level of sanity and predictability back to
the code editor... and some of the odd autoformatting word-wrapping
"features" for method calls don't appear to have an "off" mode. I know this
thing is pre-beta which means it's unsupported so I don't expect an official
response or anything from MSFT -- but I hope someone at MSFT will fix this
before your official release or you're going to be in for a world of
complaints from users. It would be a shame to ruin an otherwise fantastic
product with such a goofy unpredictable text editor.
 
For others that might be experiencing the same problem:

Under Tools|Options|Text Editor|C#|Miscellaneous|Automatic Actions, there is
a checkbox labeled:

"Automatically format completed constructs and pasted source"

If this is unchecked, a lot of the autoformatting problems go away. Changing
the "tab mode" from "smart" to "block" fixes some problems too. My
recommendation would be to change the text of that checkbox option to "Use
Autoformat" and place it in a more easy-to-find place. It should probably be
on the main TextEditor screen instead of buried in a "Misc." section. If you
insist on hiding this option in the "Misc." section, it would be helpful if
this box were unchecked by default.
 
Lecture Snoddddgrass said:
I know that this thing is pre-beta, so I'm hoping there's still time for
you to change the defaults for text formatting options in the IDE (C#
section).
Click to expand...

It's best to discuss this in the Whidbey groups that are monitored by MS
people who are actually in a position to do something about it...

-- Alan
 
It's best to discuss this in the Whidbey groups that are monitored by MS
people who are actually in a position to do something about it...
Click to expand...

Where are they? I couldn't find one. Searching on "Whidbey" on the
msnews.microsoft.com server turns up no groups...
 
First, I think that you should post this on the Whidbey private newsgroup
rather than on this one. A lot of people here don't know about Whidbey (and
did not sign NDAs, etc.)

Personnally, I think that these auto-formatting features are great, because
a lot of a programmers are lousy about punctuation, spaces, etc. and these
features help enforcing a common layout / style across team members. It
makes it easier for someone to review and maintain code that has been
written by someone else.

Also the UI to configure these options is probably not final. I have read
somewhere (probably on the private newsgroup) that they have other ideas to
configure this (a great one would be a system that analyzes a piece of code
and infers the rules from it).

Bruno.
 
I couldn't agree more with Mr. Snoddddgrass's comments.
Try writing w3c standards (X)HTML and the Visual Studio.NET IDE will mangle
your code when you switch from design view to HTML view. Scott Guthrie has
indicated that this will be fixed in Whidbey. Aside from that, I would also
like to see the ability to at least turn off ANY and ALL formatting. This
currently isn't available, as I previously mentioned.

I tried connecting to privatenews.microsoft.com, and it requires a login.
Anyone know what this login should be, or is it only open to people trying
out the new software??

Respectfully,

Todd Acheson
 
Bruno Jouhier said:
Personnally, I think that these auto-formatting features are great, because
a lot of a programmers are lousy about punctuation, spaces, etc. and these
features help enforcing a common layout / style across team members. It
makes it easier for someone to review and maintain code that has been
written by someone else.
Click to expand...

any system of this sort should be fully user-configurable (and i mean
*FULLY*!) it doesn't help me enforce a common code-formatting style across
my team if it's only capable of enforcing a style we don't use!

Also the UI to configure these options is probably not final. I have read
somewhere (probably on the private newsgroup) that they have other ideas to
configure this (a great one would be a system that analyzes a piece of code
and infers the rules from it).
Click to expand...

never happen. despite best intentions, it'd wind up being a tool that
analyzes a block of your code, then winds up formatting everything else the
way it damn well pleases, anyway! ;-)
 
I tried connecting to privatenews.microsoft.com, and it requires a login.
Anyone know what this login should be, or is it only open to people trying
out the new software??
Click to expand...

Check out the link in the other post, it gives all the details.
 
Well, the Whidbey one is really *FULLY* configurable (you have *a lot* more
options than in Visual Studio 2003). You are actually overwhelmed by
options, which is why the configuration UI probably needs a bit more work.
 
lover said:
'overwhelmed by options'

i like the sound of that! =)
Click to expand...

If only they could get the same ammount of options for C++, then I'd be
happy too. :-)

Jeroen-bart Engelen
 
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