Major Whidbey complaint (!)

[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.

[Bruno Jouhier [MVP]]

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" <microsoft rulez!> a écrit dans le message de
news:eU******** ******@TK2MSFTN GP11.phx.gbl...

"Bruno Jouhier [MVP]" <bj******@clu b-internet.fr> wrote in message
news:OM******** ******@TK2MSFTN GP10.phx.gbl...

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.

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).

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! ;-)

[lover]

'overwhelmed by options'

i like the sound of that! =)

"Bruno Jouhier [MVP]" <bj******@clu b-internet.fr> wrote in message
news:uj******** ******@tk2msftn gp13.phx.gbl...

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.

[Jeroen-bart Engelen]

lover wrote:

'overwhelmed by options'

i like the sound of that! =)

"Bruno Jouhier [MVP]" <bj******@clu b-internet.fr> wrote in message
news:uj******** ******@tk2msftn gp13.phx.gbl...

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.

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

Jeroen-bart Engelen