This entry in the ‘Visual Studio Extension’ series is not really going to cover all the power tools in the Productivity Power Tools suite (which you can get here). I might blog about some of these later, but today I just want to cover what I think is a hidden gem in the suite which just doesn’t seem to get enough exposure.
Oftentimes when you inherit a legacy code-base that hasn’t been shown the love/technical review it deserved, each class header will looks something like this:
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq.Expressions; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Web.Mvc.Html; using System.Linq; using System.IO; using Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure; using System.Web.Mvc.Html; using Newtonsoft.Json;
How many of these are really used?
And how many were made redundant when during refactoring?
And why are they out of order?
Ok, it’s fair to comment ‘what’s the big deal’ – they aren’t doing any harm, and when you compile the code they are removed anyway. But these unused imports are actually a big bugbear of mine.
- If you don’t need to import some namespaces, they shouldn’t be there
- It looks sloppy
- It hides whether your class is obeying the Single Responsibility Principle – meaning if you’re importing lots and lots of namespaces, your class is probably doing more than one kind of thing
- It’s so easy to fix, especially with the power tools extension.
Obviously in the usual Visual Studio IDE, you can right click on each class and fix them individually with the “Remove and Sort Usings” context command.
But why do this when you can do it at a project level, and do it for every class in the project?
And once you’ve cleaned your legacy project up, you can configure your settings so that every time you save, it cleans it up for you automatically!
You can read the Visual Studio team’s blog entry announcing this extension here.
You can watch the Channel 9 introduction to using the extension here.