Limited refactoring
Yesterday I was programming something in C#.NET using Visual Studio and I ran into a rather annoying lack of feature.
I am using Visual Studio 2005 so this might have been resolved in 2008 or 2010 – but non-mandatory program suites call for previous version updates! (This is why our rather limited team of developers solve this by supplying mandatory updates via subscription)
Anyway – My solution has a few projects (a main .exe and a few DLL’s) and one of these holds some settings and resources which is accessed through the ‘standard’ interface. We’ve simply double clicked the right place and added settings and resources. It works! It’s magic!!
The problem occurred when I wanted to change the default namespace for the project containing the settings and resources. VS2005 refactor my settings and resources to the new namespace – which is great, that was what I wanted – but in EVERY place where these are referred I need to change the reference manually! That was a LOT of work! Luckily it required no thinking at all!
I find it very ridiculous that the namespace is changed for the settings/resources but isn’t changed throughout the rest of the code – this is actually a feature that the normal ‘refactor’ function handles nicely without much trouble and something that a simple search and replace can solve…


