Kent Sharkey points to a site that’s aggregating user-provided feature requests for Visual Studio.
Since I don’t feel like registering for the site, I guess I’ll just post my feature request here: I want a way to make XML Comments (and comments in general) less intrusive.
I like the idea of storing documentation as XML in the same file as the code. By keeping the documentation close to the code, it increases the likelihood that the comments will evolve alongside the code they document. I really like the idea of keeping them around as XML, because that lets me run a tool like NDOC over my solution and get nice, professional looking documentation almost effortlessly. The problem is, when I’m writing code I want to look at the code – and not have inches worth of ugly comments littered with distracting XML tags taking up valuable screen real estate that could be used to show me my code.
What I’d really like to see is a Documentor-style window that provided a real-time rendering of the XML comments contained in the source file I’m currently editing. I’d like to see this window be able to float outside of the Visual Studio .NET window, so I can move it to another monitor when I’m running dual-head without having to maximize Visual Studio across both displays. This documentation window would allow me to flip back and forth between a rendered view and an XML view, so I could edit the documentation easily. Any updates I make would be persisted when I saved the parent .cs file.
It would be very cool if, while this documentation window was open, any evidence of XML comments would disappear from the code view. However, when I saved a .cs file to disk, the documentation should appear in the exact same place it does today. This would let me view the plain old source file in a text editor and still see everything.
While I’m living in a fantasy world, I say get rid of regions. They’re a good idea and I know a bunch of people who really like them, but they’re they most friggin’ annoying things ever. They always seem like they’re collapsed when I want them to be expanded, and expand when I want them collapsed. And when they are expanded, there’s all of these ugly #region directives spamming up my code. Bleargh. Now that the CLR supports partial types, I say break up the file into separate chunks and rely on Visual Studio to give me an easy way to hyperlink to a file using a single-line editor comment (which should be preceeded by the comment token of whatever language I’m using at the time).
