Question

There is an interesting coding standard in my shop that says that we don’t shortcut type names with a using statement, they have to be fully qualified (so any time you reference a type, you use MyRootNamespace.ANamespace.MaybeAnotherNamespace.MyClassName, instead of just “MyClassName“).

Love it or hate it, that’s just how we roll, and I can’t do anything about that.

Of course, you are swimming upstream with Visual Studio, because all the editing tools that generate code for you (member completion, event completion, etc) use the short type names wherever possible.

What I would like to do is to build some sort of extension or macro for Visual Studio that will correct a partial declaration, and replace it with the fully-qualified typename.

I started out trying to build a macro that would run for the symbol that your cursor is on (though I’d like to be able to scan a whole file, or maybe just intercept the code as you type).

I found that I can get members of a class with FileCodeModel2.GetElementFromPoint(), but this method will only work on class members — it won’t pick up a variable declaration inside of a method, for example.

Is there some other way I can get at that stuff? I’m currently using Macros, but would the new VS Extension model be more appropriate? I’m using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate edition, and I only need to target c# code.

Answer 1

The object model allows you to do many things that are available within the IDE. But as such a feature is not available in the IDE you are out of luck here, I’m afraid.

The only thing you can do automatically with the using directives is sort them and remove the ones that are not used.

Update

As it seems it is somewhat possible to retrieve a fully qualified type name from a macro. However, it seems problematic with special cases such as generics.