Resharper 3.0 EAP in Action - The Todo Explorer
April 18th, 2007 by jpennalThe ReSharper 3.0 EAP has been in progress for about two weeks now. This is the first post in a series that will look in detail at some of the new features that will be available in this latest version of ReSharper.
The To-do Explorer
In Visual Studio.NET 2005, you can use the Task List window to show comments with the keyword todo in it. However, this only works with files that are open in the IDE; it’s not going to show you TODOs in other parts of your solution that you don’t currently have open, or any other keyword EXCEPT todo.
The Visual Studio.NET 2005 Task List window
In ReSharper 3.0, you get the much more useful To-do Explorer. When you open this window (found in ReSharper -> Windows -> To-do Explorer), by default you see a solution-wide listing of all comments with the prefix NOTE, TODO or BUG.
The new To-do Explorer window
The default keywords that the To-do explorer looks for can be changed or added to by clicking the “To-do settings†icon in the window.
In the settings window, you can create new keywords to search for or edit the existing keywords as you’d like. This could be useful, for example, if you have a references to JIRA tickets in your comments, like:
//PROJ-1655: The following code block was added because of a change request from a client
You could add a pattern to match the keyword “PROJ-####†and see all JIRA tickets mentioned in your code.
Editing keywords in the To-do explorer
These To-dos can also be exported to a text file and can also be grouped to make the To-dos easier to read, so you can find which projects, namespaces, directories, etc … contain To-dos.
The To-do Explorer view options
April 18th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
This is a nice feature which could be very useful, if there is a way export the completed work items (for subversion commits).
I would be much more impressed by a blog post about support for the new Orcas language features. Where’s the beef in the 3.0 release if I’m not stuck in Visual Basic world?
Jürgen
April 18th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
“(…)it’s not going to show you(…)any other keyword EXCEPT todo”
This isn’t correct. The keywords “hack”, “undone” and “todo” are predefined, and you can add/customize keywords using Options -> Environment -> Task list. The requirement that files must be open is a huge drawback though, and I’m looking forward to try your implementation.
April 20th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Juergen:
I dont believe there is any way to track “completed” work items with the to-do explorer. However, off the top of my head, you could always export the outstanding todos to an xml file, commit that to SVN and then DIFF the files every time you want to see what’s changed.
As for Orcas, while there are a ton of nice features coming in that release, it’s still not going to be released for a while. On top of that, I think you’d be surprised just how many people are stuff in the Visual Basic world still
Dag:
Good catch on Visual Studio’s task list keyword customization.
April 23rd, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Juergen:
If something isn’t implemented or supported the way you’d like, then fill out our little questionnaire at:
http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/quest.jsp
Let the developers know what you want! (or would be helpful!)
April 29th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Will ReSharper 3 support .NET 3.0 in all its XAML goodness?
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:53 am
Dmitry, according to the ReSharper 3.0 EAP roadmap, there is basic support for XAML already. I do not know if the plan is for full XAML support in 3.0, but you can probably expect more XAML support to be added in the near future.
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:54 pm
I don’t know if this is the right place to post this, but I’d love it if Resharper 3 gave us full text search on all files in the loaded solution.
Thanks for a great product!
May 7th, 2007 at 10:11 am
hey andres, what full text search are you talking about?
July 31st, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Andres: answer him!