Here it all is, in one picture: everything that could be better with Visual Studio 2010’s collapsing helpers.
1) XML Comment Block Collapsing
Visual Studio has had great support for XML commenting for some time, specifically with the trip slash to quickly document existing functions. Which is why this sucks so bad.
Summary? Seriously? I don’t need to know what the first tag is in my comment block. The IDE already knows to treat these blocks differently (it allows you to collapse them), so why not show me something useful? Even the first 40 chars followed by a … would be great. Keep it on a line, that’s why I collapsed it, but let me see what it’s about.
End of rant.
2) and 4) Contiguous Comment Lines
Here I have a series of comments one after each. I’d like to be able to collapse them.
3) and 5) Language Constructs
This should be a no-brainer. Ifs, for eaches, trys, fors…they should all be collapsible.
Further, how about supporting SHIFT + CTRL + ‘+’ and ‘-’ to handle this one. What’s that? You’re in a for each? No worries, let me collapse that for you quickly while you figure out context, then you can easily expand back out!
That would be sweet.
6) Arbitrary Selection
When I margin-select, or multi-line select any block of code, I would like to see a collapse marker appear in the margin.
But it’s all good…
The truth is that I am so completely fortunate to have the means to work on a big fat 24” monitor and I am not challenged with space.
Just about, but not quite.
I can still use CTRL+Mouse Wheel to zoom in/out and I do have 3 screens in front of me (one 1900x1200 and two 1280x1024) for real estate. When things get really tight, vertically, I can always resort to using auto-hide on my error list. Pshshh! I don’t have any errors anyways!
I can work through the lack of support for these collapsing features, but I don’t envy the fellah who’s got to work on a smaller screen. In spite of the level of awesomeness in Visual Studio 2010, I love how many good things must be coming down the road.
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