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XNA Shaman
Option Auction!

I made a comment about the state of VS options in a previous post and thought it would be interesting to see which options:

  1. People had no idea what the option actually did?
  2. People understood the option but had no idea why someone would change it?

I'm more than happy to track down the option's people comment on and find why it exists and who the intended audience is for the change.

I just did a quick run down on the VS 2003 environment option pages and the following ones had me scratching my head:

  • Environment.General.Animate Environment Tools (with a great slider to adjust the speed!). What - why is this an option?
  • Environment.General.Docked Window Behavior. This set of check boxes actually produced a lot of discussion and angst when it was first introduced. The basic gist is that when you are working with Tabbed documents you can control the behavior of the “close” and “pin“ buttons. Close should close only the current window, when the pin affects all windows that are docked. Is this right or not?
  • Environment.Documents.Re-use current document window, if saved. Who uses this option - I'm going to ask the team about this option but does anyone ever turn this on?

I stopped here but I'd like to know - which options have you scratching your head?

 

 

Posted: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 11:50 AM by JoeN
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Comments

Philip Rieck said:

I don't know about scratching my head on an option, but I do find it extremely odd (and annoying) that there is an option to remove the status bar (as if I would complain about having to have the status bar there when not in full screen mode), but there is not an option to turn off the damn "I know which intellisense member you picked last summer" hell-spawn that guesses at what member to highlight first in the intellisense drop down.

Why give us useless options like the three above if you're going to aggrivate us with behavioral changes we can't revert? Wheh... glad that's off my chest.


# January 27, 2004 2:06 PM

Chris Kinsman said:

TextEditor.C#.General.Hide Advanced Members

Which ones are advanced and which ones are simpletons? Why would I not want to see "Advanced" members.

Analyzer.General.AutoPlayTrack new windows

What the heck is AutoPlayTracking?
# January 27, 2004 6:01 PM

Joe Nalewabau said:

Philip,

I'm glad that a feature that I advocated and worked on "I know which Intellisense member you picked last summer" was such a hit with you :-)

You can trun this behaviour off - it's in Tools.Options.Text Editor.C#.Formatting."Intellisense preselects most frequently used members"
# January 29, 2004 8:46 AM

Philip Rieck said:

Boy, is my face red. I guess I shouldn't rant about things without some due dilligence.

One question though -- formatting? seems an odd category. Many Thanks for pointing it out though - and giving me the heads up via my contact form.


And As far as the actual feature goes, it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for typed datasets and having to use VB.NET, really...

I have a typed dataset with a table named "bob". The dataset also has a type named bobRow. So when I want to type ds.bob (short, I can type it) IS gives me ds.bobRow instead. Then I backspace the Row, but IS has kicked in, giving me bobRow again -- repeat until my brain remembers to hit escape. This hapens three or four times a day sometimes.

You could probably argue that I'm an idiot and should learn to hit escape, but I'll blame your feature instead, since that makes me feel better about myself. In fact, I'm already starting to rationalize not finding the option even though I looked for it... ("Who put that in "C#.Formatting" when it's affecting VB.Behaviour, I'm asking myself...")
# January 29, 2004 10:59 AM

Alfredo Mendez said:

Hey Chris,

I was a PM in Analyzer for .Net and Everett, so I guess I'm to take blame for Analyzer.General.AutoPlayTrack new windows

In retrospective, we should have used a more intuitive name for that option 8)

Essentially, it works like this:
When you are in playback mode in a VS Analyzer project, you can choose whether you want the "playback" animation to show in newly created windows.

Why would anyone want to turn it off?
Hmm thats a good question, since this applies to newly created windows and there is a toolbar button to toggle playback once a views is opened.

I guess the best reason for turning it off is when you are on playback and see an interesting event come in, then you can open the details view on that event without worrying of it being updated on the next "tick" of the playback...

Regarding the other options, I'm definitely interested to know why anyone would turn on:
Environment.General.Docked Window Behavior.Auto_Hide_Button_Affects_Active_Tab_Only

I've never seen a tabbed window in which the buttons in the caption only apply to the active tab ::scratchhead::
# February 4, 2004 3:27 PM

Joku said:

"I know which intellisense member you picked last summer"

I'm not sure if this is what i think, but generally, the features related to Intellisense should be selectable according to user preferences. Have them all on by default, but allow to turn the Intellisense tricks off one by one..
# March 6, 2004 5:17 AM

Thomas Eyde said:

How do you invent all these options? Reading this thread I get the impression that you waste a lot of energy to implement feature no one has asked for or understand. I hope my impression is wrong, because I'd like it very much that you use your energy on the things we need.
# March 25, 2004 11:22 PM
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