In my adventures in the Xamarin mobile world I particularly liked the fact how their Xamarin Studio IDE visually handles TODO comments. Basically, all it does is make the TODO part bold. I know that it’s a small thing to worry about, but I value the comments in my code and am a sucker for creating some more clarity within them. In my search for a similar (or better) experience in Visual Studio I came across the CommentsPlus extension. Could this be the one?
Let me start off by saying that I believe Resharper also has some similar functions but with that being a considerable investment, I was looking for a free alternative. CommentsPlus offers just that. A simple, configurable plugin that lets you create all sorts of different comment types. What kind of comments you ask? Well, out of the box it supports the following markup:
If you can’t appreciate all the happy colors in your IDE, CommentsPlus is willing to let you customize them by going into your Options dialog under Environment > Fonts and Colors > Text Editor. It’s also still being actively developed and will at some point even include tags like //+, //++, //- and //-- to create bigger and smaller fonts. All in all it definetly gives my comments a bit more context than can be done with text alone and that’s a good thing.
