You a Visual Studio user? A lot of us are. If you are the only develoer working on a project, then you have the luxury of choosing your own format for your code files. Cleaning up code files when working in a team however, can be much more difficult. Especially when you run into files that everything seems like it is everywhere! Methods, properties and fields just strewn throughout the code file without any rhyme or reason of their positioning in the code file. Well, if you are a C# programmer and you have experienced this then this is your lucky day. May I introduce you to Regionerate?

Regionerate is a nifty little addin that will auto-magically clean up C# files before your very eyes! Since the developer team I work with started using it, we have all been less fearful to open code files. This tool is great! if you open a file and just hit the command keys to run the addin, it will immediately clean up the code file and make it more readable for you. If you don't like any of the default code formats for Regionerate, then you can write your own format *.xml file and instruct Regionerate to use it as the default code format.

The next addin is a life saver in my opinion. If you abstract your code correctly then you may not have to use many comments within your methods because they will be pretty self explanitory. You may however, want to take the time to insert the xml comments that describe the method and what it is for. This can get time consuming. My buddy from work truned me on to a great addin called GhostDoc. This addin takes the method and puts in the xml comments above it for you when you strike the right command keys. GhostDoc is a huge time saver and I recommend it to anyone who is dedicated to putting the xml comments above all their methods as I am. GhostDoc makes using those documentation tools that generate the MSDN style documentation for your projects so much easier to bare using.

Do you use SVN? I know I do. I am forced to use SourceSafe at times, but when I have the choice it is SVN for me. I read about an addin called VisualSVN for using a SVN/TortiseSVN setup for source control. VisualSVN integrates everything you need to do for source control into the Visual Studio IDE. Not only checking in and out files, but also the ability to branch and tag your project. VisualSVN puts all this ability into a Visual Studio menu and a file context menu.

So for all you who didn't know this before, now you do! So enjoy coding more efficiently.

Happy Coding!