Sunday, January 11, 2009

Ora, The Region Alternative

CodePlexOra

“Ora is a Visual Studio 2008 add-in that provides an instant grouped overview of the class, interface or struct you are viewing or editing. Because the members are grouped in the order of your choosing, and the view instantly appears when you click in the code of a class, there is no need to abuse the #region feature. Just keep Ora docked next to the source editor and the equivalent groupings just appear automatically.

orascreenshot

Forget using cumbersome #region statements to group together class members. What if you want to see them grouped a different way? And isn't it a bad idea to repeat the same information twice in source code? What if the region structure doesn't reflect the truth? Regions, like comments, should be used to supply information that can't be recovered automatically by an add-in, such as Ora.

Ora is latin for region, amongst other things.

…”

An interesting Visual Studio add-in for those who looking beyond regions for access/grouping. It’s kind of like the Class Diagram but on steroids * 10. And one of cooler things is that sample code is provided so you can add your own grouping. So you’re not tied to how the author decided to group the methods…

Oh yeah, it works for VB projects too.  ;)

(via Visual Studio GalleryOra)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hit CTRL + F11 in Resharper.

Basically the same thing.

:)

Anonymous said...

As a non-user of R# (gasp!), thanks for the link!

David Kemp said...

@pete.m

Not using R#? Heretic!

Daniel said...

Thanks for blogging about Ora!

@scalvert - I am a R# user myself. File Structure view only groups based on regions. So you have put regions in the code. The only point of Ora is to perform grouping automatically in the tree view, so regions aren't needed.