Category Archives: Code Formatting

Paying too much attention to something that doesn’t really matter.

Disabling Automatic Closing Braces in Visual Studio Code

I really like Visual Studio Code as an editor, but it has some annoying defaults.

When working in C# (and a lot of other languages), it tries to be “helpful” by automatically adding closing braces, brackets, and parentheses when you type the opening ones.

An Automatic Closing Brace

Automatic closing brace added when typing an opening brace.

For some people, this is great. For me, no. It just doesn’t work with my typing and coding style, and ends up being something that gets in the way and I have to move or remove later.

Fortunately it’s easy to turn this off.

Go to File –> Preferences –> Settings

Search for “auto closing brackets”.

Change “Editor: Auto Closing Brackets” to “never”.

Auto Closing Brackets Setting

Turning off the auto closing brackets setting.

Problem solved. Happy coding!

Pulled Over by FxCop

I ran FxCop against the Basternae source for the first time today. It ran 778,249 checks and found 10,850 issues.

While some of these really are design flaws, some minor and some serious, many of them are not applicable to this project, such as the security declarations and assembly signing. Here’s how I break down what FxCop has complained about:

Applicable issues:
* Array fields should not be read only.
* Avoid type names in parameters.
* Avoid uncalled private code.
* Avoid unnecessary string creation.
* Collections should implement generic interface.
* Consider passing base types as parameters.
* Do not cast unnecessarily.
* Do not concatenate strings inside loops.
* Do not declare visible instance fields. (This is what the encapsulation I’m working on is all about, and was a significant percentage of what FxCop complained about.)
* Do not initialize unnecessarily.
* Do not name enum values ‘Reserved’. (This was a surprise.)
* Do not pass types by reference.
* Do not raise reserved exception types.
* Enums should have a zero value.
* Flags enums should have plural names. (Dang, this one is pretty nitpicky.)
* ICollection implementations have strongly typed members.
* Identifiers should be cased correctly. (Yes, it actually complains about that, and there were a lot found.)
* Identifiers should have correct suffix.
* Identifiers should not have incorrect suffix.
* Identifiers should not match keywords. (Alias, Object, Event, and Exit classes.)
* Implement standard exception constructors.
* Interface methods should be callable by child types.
* Lists are strongly typed.
* Mark all non-serializable fields.
* Mark assemblies with assembly version (Been doing this, but missed one.)
* Mark ISerializable types with serializable. (Fixed these immediately. Duh.)
* Mark members as static. (It’s not the right solution for the ones FxCop found, but there are problems with what it found.)
* Nested types should not be visible.
* Non-constant fields should not be visible. (Encapsulation again.)
* Operations should not overflow.
* Operator overloads have named alternatives.
* Override equals and operator equals on value types.
* Provide correct arguments to formatting methods.
* Remove empty finalizers.
* Remove unused locals.
* Rethrow to preserve stack details.
* Review visible event handlers.
* Static holder types should not have constructors.
* Test for empty strings using string length.
* Type names should not match namespaces.
* Types that own disposable fields should be disposable.
* Use properties where appropriate.
* Validate arguments of public methods. (Note that FxCop does not appear to be Contract-aware, so some of these will be non-issues.)

Non-applicable issues found:
* Assemblies should declare minimum security.
* Assemblies should have valid strong names.
* Mark assemblies with CLSCompliant.
* Mark assemblies with ComVisible.
* Specify CultureInfo. (This is not an internationalized application.)
* Specifiy IFormatProvider. (Yet again, not an internationalized application.)
* Specify MessageBoxOptions. (This refers to right-to-left reading language support, also not applicable.)

Issues I don’t agree with:
* Do not catch general exception types. (Sometimes it really is the simplest and best solution.)
* Do not declare read only mutable reference types.
* Do not expose generic lists.
* Do not pass literals as localized parameters. Use a resource table instead.
* Identifiers should be spelled correctly. (FxCop didn’t like my use of “x” and “y” as variables in a coordinate class.)
* Identifiers should not contain underscores. (There are a ton of these, about 30% of the Cop’s finds. Pretty much all of our flags are named using underscores.)
* Long acronyms should be Pascal-cased. (Side effects of the previous issue.)
* Only FlagsAttribute enums should have plural names. (Stop whining about names already!)
* Prefer jagged arrays over multidimensional. (No. There’s a specific reason for multidimensional arrays.)
* Short acronyms should be uppercase.
* Used preferred terms.

So yes, there are quite a few things to be fixed. I’m not going to spend any extra effort on that right now — some of these problems will resolve themselves as part of the in-progress changes. Even so, it’s nice to be aware of what doesn’t match preferred style, even if it accomplishes nothing other than having a solid knowledge of which rules are being broken on purpose. I’m sure I’ll post updates on FxCop stats as the code evolves.

Astyle Rocks!

I’m EXTREMELY picky about the formatting of my code. There are a few commonly-known formats for code: ANSI, Kerninghan & Ritchie, GNU, Linux, and Java.

I have a a very strong preference for ANSI style, but with one minor modification: I like my switch statement case labels to be indented. That’s not a strong preference, as long as the brackets look right.

This drives me nuts (ARRR!):

if( a == b ) {
return;
}

This makes me happy:

if( a == b )
{
return;
}

So, the fact that a lot of code has the former annoys me every time I see it, and I either change it, or frown and move on.

Today I discovered an excellent program, astyle:

http://astyle.sourceforge.net/

It lets you choose what formatting to give your code, goes through it all, and changes it to be however you want. The way I think code should be is:

astyle –style=ansi -s4 –indent-switches

All of a sudden it looks pretty, and I can read it without twitching. Not only does it do everything I mentioned Visual Studio doing in my May 15th post, it also rearranges brackets to be where I want them.

It’s very unlikely that I’ll bring on any programmers, but if I do, I’ll definitely have a stated “official lysanctioned” code formatting style.

Code Reformatting

One thing I’ve always found annoying is the way that different applications and operating systems handle tabs. In some programs a tab will move you over 4 spaces. Other apps will have different sizes, like 5 or 6 spaces. This can cause things that line up in one app to look totally out of whack on another.

When editing code this can be very annoying, especially if you check things by seeing whether braces line up and visually analyzing code flow.

Just yesterday I discovered some neat tools in Microsoft Visual Studio that I had never known about. They are edit->advanced->untabify and edit->advanced->format. What that does is convert all the tabs in a file to spaces and then reformat it according to the Visual Studio automatic formatting rules, which are perfectly aligned with my personal preferences. Because all the tabs are now spaces the file will look the same in any editor.

Editing code just got a whole lot less annoying.