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Rotan Hanrahan - 24 Aug 2004 15:57 GMT

Familiar with the //TODO: comments we put in textual source code?

Why not have an equivalent for the Form Editor in the IDE, so we can (for
example) put a sticky yellow note next to the ugly button saying "really
need to draw a better icon for this button".

I RAD a lot, so all the visually start and end in the Form Editor, and
there's nowhere for me to put comments except in the source code.

It's just an idea, and I'm saying it here in the hope that some MS person
picks up on it and thinks: "Could be done. We could embed the sticky notes
as comments in the designer generated code, including the XYWH location
details."

Or is this an idea that's been done already, or coming in the next version?

---Rotan.

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Uri Dor - 26 Aug 2004 11:35 GMT

I think it can be done without changes to the IDE:
Write a control which is always visible=false, give it some yellow
stick-note appearance in the designer, write your own CodeDomSerializer
for it (see "Customizing Code Generation in the .NET Framework Visual
Designers" in msdn).
That should do it.
The only question I have is this: when you see such a message in the
task list and double-click it, what do you expect the IDE to do?
Maybe you need to show tooltips in the designer - not sure if that's
possible.

> Familiar with the //TODO: comments we put in textual source code?
>
[quoted text clipped - 13 lines]
>
> ---Rotan.

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Rotan Hanrahan - 26 Aug 2004 11:45 GMT

I suspect the only two places a design-time control can render are:
1. The rectangle containing the form being designed
2. The strip where controls like Timer and OpenFileDialog are placed.
Like textual comments, you don't want the comments to obscure the material
on which you are working. So I would envisage the little yellow e-stickies
being placed in the region outside the form's rectangle. Possibly with lines
connecting to the control in the form to which the e-stickie is commenting.
So unless I'm wrong about the rendering limitations of a design-time
control, I suspect this feature could only be done properly through direct
access to the IDE code. In other words, this is a job for MS.

---Rotan

> I think it can be done without changes to the IDE:
> Write a control which is always visible=false, give it some yellow
[quoted text clipped - 24 lines]
> >
> > ---Rotan.

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