Regions: Love or Hate

[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

[kp_brown]

That. Is. Insane.

[ScottK7]

Having spent the last 10-15 minutes learning more than I ever knew, cared to know, or ever dreamed there was to know, about the names (people waste their lives inventing names for this stuff???) and histories of these various indentation styles, I now feel my brain has been eternally and irrevocably damaged for the effort. Of all the 15 minute spans of my life that have gone to waste, I believe this one will be lamented the most. And, sorry, have to agree with the last poster about your choice of styles. :)

[Fabio Franco]

I find them useful to separate different regions inside a big class, like fields, properties, methods and constructors

"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson

[KSig]

Place the public stuff first. That is where the story of your class starts

[Morry1337]

That was a horrible, horrible block of code. The regions dont fix that. Logical groups should be different methods not regions. We use regions around Constants & Fields and Ctors and Dtors. And this is done automagicly by our tooling. (ReSharper + Stylecop) Other than that I cant think of anywhere else I would want to use them.

[GlobX]

I LOVE regions. If I really think about it though, it's more a side-effect of the regions than the regions themselves. I usually have a few main regions in my classes: private members, properties, constructors, methods, static methods etc. This has the wonderful direct effect of when I open one of my classes and I want to find property blah, I can pop open the properties region and it's there (I know I can use the drop-downs at the top of the code window but that's no fun!). It also has the, arguably, more useful side-effect of keeping all like-things together, so that when new people look at the code, it's much harder for them to put new properties at the bottom of the file instead of with the other properties. My logic here is, let's face it, most of us coders are "OCD" in the sense that we like order and symmetry and things like that, so putting a property outside of the properties region that's already defined makes you feel 'icky' and you want to move it. That's my 37 cents anyway...

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Typical n-tiered architecture: DB <-> Junk(0) <-> ... <-> Junk(n-1) <-> Pretty

[JamesHurst]

I really love that feature. That said, yes they need to be used sensibly to avoid getting ugly. Regions are a great tool for organizing your code, such that when you bring up a file you are looking at a small number of regions, which - ideally - are marked so as to direct you quickly to exactly where want to go. It's a topic that a dev team needs to discuss and settle upon standard practices for, early on. IMO

James Hurst "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
Mahatma Gandhi

[JamesHurst]

I agree 100% - but you expressed it much better than I.

James Hurst "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
Mahatma Gandhi

[Kirk Wood]

I knew there was trouble in the second line of code. If a region doesn't look totally out of place in a given method, you are doing it wrong. Refactor to use another method that represents the region. Aside from that, I do personally like regions inside classes to group a few things together (such as the properties).