Regions: Love or Hate

[Dan Neely]

What do you consider the too complicated and need split threshold to be? IMO regions start being useful in keeping stuff organized well before that point.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[BobJanova]

As soon as you can't navigate the file (in your mind or using something like the tree view which is in most IDEs showing you the structure) any more. That's obviously very subjective (and depends on the domain) but in general somewhere around 500-1000 lines.

[Dan Neely]

I've never used the IDE treeviews for within classes; showing them and the one for files/projects either hogs too much space or requires swapping between them all the time adding more annoyance than it's worth. Also, even with icons globbing everything into a class into a single flat list has never seemed logical to me. A large part of what I use regions for is clumping similar items together (similar to OriginalGriff's setup[^]). With that in place I find classes generally remain manageable until around 1500 lines. The only time this is often an issue is with complex UI forms; where I've yet to find a good balance between classes getting bloated or where a specific feature is in a pile of custom controls only used on a single dialog.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[dazfuller]

I have a love/hate relationship with regions. Personally I use them for breaking a code file into sections, so Fields, Properties, Public Methods etc... Now that I don't mind as I can still find things quite easily, I'm sure others might disagree but it works for me. What I hate is when developers put them around every method! Even worse is when they only use the method name instead of the whole signature, for example

#region MyMethod

public int MyMethod(int a, int b) { ... }

#endregion

#region MyMethod

public int MyMethod(int a, int b, string c) { ... }

#endregion

Which one is it that I need to look at? And what does this add as I can collapse the methods anyway! Seriously, if you do this then you should have your keyboard taken away from you until you know better!

[SimonRigby]

Dave Kerr wrote:

Now I hate them, each member of our team uses them differently.

I think that's the issue right there .. its not regions that's the problem .. its inconsistent use. You could say the same for any tool/practice. I use them to group things away that I don't need to see, like private members etc, and I use them consistently for this reason.

The only thing unpredictable about me is just how predictable I'm going to be.

[Brad Stiles]

Marcus_2 wrote:

Good, if used with some sense.

You mean, like almost everything else ever done in programming? :)

Currently reading: "Swords and Deviltry", by Fritz Leiber

[Remi BOURGAREL]

I always say : when you use region, just create another class ! It's useful only for generated code (like proxy class for web services)

[BrianPayne]

I LOVE regions, but only on a structured, limited basis. They are helpful to organize the class, but can get unruly if overused. I stick to several standard regions and alphabetize my methods, properties, etc, so that everything is easy to find. - Catalyst

[TNCaver]

It seems to me that you really don't hate regions, you just hate how they've been misused.

[8xFather]

I liked the idea but didn't use them very often because they didn't stand out when collapsed. After changing the “Collapsed Text” to orange in the options I use them a lot. Tools/Options/Environment/Fonts and Colors/Collapsed Text/Item foreground

[TNCaver]

I find them useful to separate true regions in the code, i.e., constructors, private properties, public properties, private methods and public methods. They are useful especially in code-behind pages with a lot of code that make for a lot of scrolling. When I collapse the code page to definitions, they are all you see between the class definition and Namespace declarations, making it easy to expand the region I'm looking for to view, edit or add to. Most of the comments I've seen here that oppose them seem to direct their hatred at how they are (mis)used, but don't really say why regions are in themselves bad. That's kind of like hating pencils because they can be used to write bad English. :)

[Naruki 0]

idiots people who like stupid space-wasting, conceptually-disorganized styles like Allman. But I guess the use of inferior editors that are incapable of brace matching, as well as dysfunctional eyes that cannot scan up-/downward to matching indents, are all factors in why they would give up as real developers need to use such a style. That, or they just really, really, really love Microsoft. 1TBS or GTFO

Narf.

[spencepk]

This is what I call abuse/overuse. It makes my eyes roll back in my head when I see this crap, comments would've been more than sufficient.

        foreach (DataRow currentRow in sortedTable.Table.Rows) {
            #region Load Data and set defaults
            creditCardNumber = currentRow\["CCNUMBER"\].ToString();
            cardHolder = currentRow\["CARDHOLDER"\].ToString();
            employeeId = currentRow\["EMPLCODE"\].ToString();
            deptNumber = currentRow\["DEPTCODE"\].ToString();
            accountNumber = currentRow\["GLCODE"\].ToString();
            expElemNumber = currentRow\["EXPELEM"\].ToString();
            fullRecord = currentRow\["FULLRECORD"\].ToString();
            isValidDept = true;
            isValidAcct = true;
            #endregion
            #region If Company Credit Card, don't process
            if (creditCardNumber == companyCard) {
                Trace.WriteLineIf(tron, "\[VERIFICATION\] Skipping Company Credit Card... ");
                continue;
            }
            else {
                this.statusReport.Text = "Verifying " + creditCardNumber + "...";
                this.rtbStatus.Text += "Verifying " + creditCardNumber + " \[" + cardHolder.Trim() + "\]...\\t";
                Trace.WriteLineIf(tron, "\[VERIFICATION\] Verifying Credit Card # : " + creditCardNumber);
                email\_er.Write("Credit Card Number: " + creditCardNumber + " for Card Holder: " + cardHolder.Trim() + "...");
            }
            #endregion
            #region Address Employee #, Dept #, Account #, and Expense Element
            if (employeeId.Trim().Length != 4) {
                employeeId = employeeId.PadLeft(4, '0');
            }
            if (deptNumber.Trim().Length != 4) {
                deptNumber = deptNumber.PadLeft(4, '0');
            }
            if (accountNumber.Trim().Length != 7) {
                accountNumber = accountNumber.PadLeft(7, '0');
            }
            if (expElemNumber.Trim().Length != 2) {
                expElemNumber = expElemNumber.PadLeft(2, '0');
            }
            #endregion
            #region Verify Deptartment Number from BoA File
            try {
                isValidDept = query.isValidDepartment(deptNumber);
                if (!isValidDept) Trace.WriteLineIf(tron, "\[VERIFICATION\] Bank of America Department is in

[Fernando A Gomez F]

I don't use them. I use Visual Studio's class explorer to navigate to the desired member, so don't need them. I don't mind if anybody else uses them though...

[John Boyett]

That makes a lot of sense. I might try using them that way.

[OriginalGriff]

Wouldn't know - I use Whitesmiths style. :-D

Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together. Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."

[Naruki 0]

If anything, that is an even more retarded differently-abled variant of Allman. You have my sympathies. Hopefully, you are functional enough to be allowed to live a [mostly] normal adult life.

Narf.

[TNCaver]

That is a horrible misuse. Regions should never be used inside a code block, IMO.

[Kabwla Phone]

I think this is a good example of good usage. The advantage a region has over a comment is that a region can signal the end of your logical block. With a comment you would have to asume that the comment is valid until the next comment. And as you know, assumtion makes an ... out of u and me.

[Alan Burkhart]

I generally group code blocks in regions according to purpose. The file menu and edit menu each gets its own region, and printing, if the project does any printing. It helps me stay organized and makes various blocks of code easier to find.

XAlan Burkhart