Visual Studio 2010 Code Editor Box Selection and Multi-Line Editing

I had seen it before but now that Scott Guthrie ‘bragged’ about it I feel the need to respond.

Yes it is cool to be able to do box selection just because you can but:

1. How many times do you actually need to change multiple variables from public to private?
2. How many times do you need to change the names of variables due to a coding convention? (And will they all start in the same column?)
3. How many times do you need to add the same comment to every line?

One of the best skills a programmer has to acquire is the DRY principle. Don’t Repeat Yourself. All I see is the danger of inexperienced people writing the same lines over and over again because now they able to do so very quickly thanks to Multi-Line Editing:

private int _number0 = 0;

private int _number1 = 1;

private int _number2 = 2;

private int _number3 = 3;

private int _number4 = 4;

private int _number5 = 5;

private int _number6 = 6;

private int _number7 = 7;

private int _number8 = 8;

private int _number9 = 9;

 

private void OhNoes()

{

    Console.WriteLine(_number0);

    Console.WriteLine(_number1);

    Console.WriteLine(_number2);

    Console.WriteLine(_number3);

    Console.WriteLine(_number4);

    Console.WriteLine(_number5);

    Console.WriteLine(_number6);

    Console.WriteLine(_number7);

    Console.WriteLine(_number8);

    Console.WriteLine(_number9);

}

Instead of:

private int[] _numbers = new []{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9};

 

private void OhYes()

{

    for (int i = 0; i < _numbers.Length; i++)

    {

        Console.WriteLine(_numbers[ i ]);

    }

}

 

 

Two other issues I ran into while in Multi-Line Editing mode are:

1. No code completion; no support for Ctrl+Space, Shift+Ctrl+Space and snippets (tab-tab).
2. No renaming/refactoring; Ctrl+.

All in all: a nice feature so you can copy past a block from Visual Studio to your blog.