Visual Studio C# statement collapsing

Question

When editing really long code blocks (which should definitely be refactored anyway, but that's beyond the scope of this question), I often long for the ability to collapse statement blocks like one can collapse function blocks. That is to say, it would be great if the minus icon appeared on the code outline for everything enclosed in braces. It seems to appear for functions, classes, regions, namespaces, usings, but not for conditional or iterative blocks. It would be fantastic if I could collapse things like ifs, switches, foreaches, that kind of thing!

Googling into that a bit, I discovered that apparently C++ outlining in VS allows this but C# outlining in VS does not. I don't really get why. Even notepad++ will so these collapses if I select the C# formatting, so I don't get why Visual Studio doesn't.

Does anyone know of a VS2008 add-in that will enable this behavior? Or some sort of hidden setting for it?

Edited to add: inserting regions is of course an option and it did already occur to me, but quite frankly, I shouldn't have to wrap things in a region that are already wrapped in braces... if I was going to edit the existing code, I would just refactor it to have better separation of concern anyway. ("wrapping" with new methods instead of regions ;)

Answer 1

This feature has been added to Visual Studio 2010's C# editor. I can't find the source verifying it was actually put in, but I remember seeing it on one of the Dev 10 team member blogs talking about changes since Beta 1 or something. As a consolation, here's one Microsoft comment suggesting they wanted to add it.

Answer 2

Starting with Visual Studio 2017, statement collapsing is built-in.

There are several extensions that perform this task for pre-2017 versions of VS, starting with VS 2010 version:

• C# outline
• C# outline 2012 (@MSDN)
• C# outline 2013 (@MSDN)
• C# outline 2015 (@MSDN)
• Visual Basic and C# Outliner

The last extension supports only VS 2015 and VS 2017, but it's the most powerful one.
It supports syntax coloring inside collapsed blocks, it is more fault-tolerant and optimized.

If the extension doesn't seem to install after you used a browser to download it, try using the built-in Visual Studio extension manager.

Answer 3

I have found this for Visual Studio 2013 and found it very helpful. It works even if you put simple braces around your code with { ..... }

After sharing I found somebody else also mentioned this link. My vote is for this tool also.

C# Outlining Tool for Visual Studio 2013

Answer 4

In VS2017 you can highlight a section of code, right-click, Outlining > Hide selection. This will collapse the code and provide a toggle to the section highlighted.

Answer 5

I'm not aware of add-ins, but you mentioned regions and I see nothing wrong with doing something like this...

foreach (Item i in Items)
{
  #region something big happening here
  ...
  #endregion

  #region something big happening here too
  ...
  #endregion

  #region something big happening here also
  ...
  #endregion
}

EDIT: In response to the question's EDIT: You're right, sticking a bunch of regions everywhere isn't ideal and refactoring is probably the way to go. But it seems that you're looking for something magical that will "organize" the code for you, and I don't think that exists.

Answer 6

I will add here that in VS 2010 Microsoft has added WPF adorner capabilities using Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), this will allow us to extend the source code editor to organize them in a much better way to make it more readable and accessible.

For instance the Summary Comments visualizer that Scott Gu demoed at PDC 2008.

So look forward to a better tomorrow for developers :)