Visual Studio - automatically add necessary spaces to comments - vb.net

When I'm writing comments in my code, I often forget to add the initial space after the comment identifier.
'this is a comment
when really it is supposed to be
' this is a comment
I realize this is quite trivial, and you could simply say "just add the damn space you idiot", but I'd really like to automate this so that I just don't have to worry about it.
Can anyone point me in the right direction of an elegant way to add the comment space?
note I do realize that a catch all string replace or regex replace could screw up other things ... IE:
Dim something As String = "I'm a nerd"
would actually come out
Dim something As String = "I' m a nerd"
So the way I see this being resolved is if it's only on a line by it's self and is not followed by a second single quote... IE: '' would not trigger the replacement.

You could always get a copy of resharper and one of the rules in there is what you are describing. Once you finish with your code you can do a format on the whole file or even solution and it will globally fix that rule for you.

This would be a pretty good case for an editor extension. You can detect when a line is whitespace, apostrophe, not white space and either insert the space or put a decoration so you will learn to follow the pattern. If you've moved to 2010, consider it - they are really pretty easy to write.

I had and have similiar problems. This is a habit which you can change. Yet, sometimes your brain is just wired to make the same mistakes. For instance, no matter what I do, I always type data instead of date.
You can change your behavior. Find some method that you find helpful for changing habits. Create a "personal code review" checklist and add this item. After a few months, you will find the space comes naturally.
If this is one of the "hard-wired" brain goofs, then create a *Visual Studio" macro that visit's CodeDom. Through the CodeDom namespace it is easy to find comments and make changes as needed. Why use regular-expressions?
If you want to use regular-expressions, because you are familiar and it is easier, then create a better expression to avoid potential errors.
Refactoring VB.NET code with regular expressions at http://www.vbmigration.com/Blog/post/2008/07/Refactoring-VB%2cNET-code-with-regular-expressions.aspx should be helpful in creating better regular-expressions.

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Intellij IDEA SDK - How can I programmatically handle spellcheck 'typos'?

Wrote a plugin to handle some custom format stuff in yaml files that I've written for a huge project. It's a chat bot that can respond in a huge number of ways. There is a lot of slang and non-standard words in the yaml.
I don't want to disable spellchecking as I want to fix legitimate speeling errors. But the annotations under the "misspelled" slang words are conflicting with the annotations in my plugin, and causing issue.
One yaml file has 349 "typos". 10% or so are legit. The rest are slang and custom words.
I need to do one of two things. Either add those words to the dictionary (I've found the method to do that - SpellCheckManager.getInstance(project).acceptWordAsCorrect()) OR get a list of the words and create a custom dictionary from them. Both approaches require me to grab a list of all typos in the document/editor/project.
That's the part I can't find. Looked everywhere. (List of current Annotations? List of current Problems?) Googled my fingers off. Anyone able to point me in the right direction?
This is not the IDEAL solution, but it worked for my means, and I'm leaving the answer in case this is googled.
In DaemonCodeAnalyzerImpl, there is a method:
DaemonCodeAnalyzerImpl.getHighlights(Document document, HighlightSeverity minSeverity, Project project);
This returns a list of all highlights in the document. The method is Annotated with #TestOnly, and docs state that it should only be used in Test code because it breaks/shortcuts the normal way to access that. It still works in non-test code however.
Since the only thing I wanted was the strings of the typos, I pulled the list, then looped through the HighlightInfo's in the list, and pulled the .getText()s.
No danger of screwing anything up.
Then pushed all those strings into:
SpellCheckerManager.getInstance(project).acceptWordAsCorrect(word, project);
Viola! All current highlighted typos are now added to the dictionary.
Proper solution? No. Good enough for what I needed to accomplish? Yup.

Intelij extract method keeps trying to replace duplicate method signatures - please stop

Intellij has a really neat feature, that lets me seamlessly extract a block of code into its own method. I can then give this method a nice, descriptive name and move on with life.
However, intellij also tries to find other blocks of code that are similar, and then tries to perusade me that I should also refactor them too, to use this new method its made. And then, when I hit the oddly-named "cancel" button (which implies the whole operation is cancelled, but it's not, it just stops asking about any remaining blocks), it leaves me looking at whatever the block of code it last asked me about.
I really don't like this feature. Here's why: If I'm say comparing two ints - the naming of the code block will depend on the context of those two ints, but intellij will find any comparison between two ints anywhere in that file, and then insist that this is also a candidate for extraction.
Most times it is not, and to make it worse, when I ask intellij to stop it, in a fit of pique, leaves me wherever the last comparison was, so now I have to navigate back to where I was working.
How do I tell intellij just to extract exactly what I selected, and do nothing else?
Please follow/vote/comment the issue created for this usability problem at YouTrack:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-233201

VS keeps changing my camel casing

I have posted on this before, but couldn't find a simple example. Here's one. I had some code commented out. Part if it was a comment. I used un-comment to turn the code back on for testing. And so this...
'check to see if this is a "simple" struct that has only basic types inside, not additional embedded type 5's
Turned into this...
check to see if this Is a "simple" struct that has only basic types inside, Not additional embedded type 5's
Look at the Is and Not. This isn't happening on all keywords, it appears that it's primarily Linq related terms get re-camel cased - Is, On, Where etc. And that's weird, because I don't have or use Linq in any of my projects.
This is annoying, but what is actually damaging is when this happens inside quotes. Let's say you had something like this...
'this is a "really long comment that I want to split into two lines"
Now I place my cursor in front of, say, "I" and hit return. This produces a second line with a trailing quote. Now every keyword in the entire file from that point on is re-cased, because there's an open quote confusing VS. Now my git diff is basically screwed.
Does anyone have any suggestions on what might be happening and how to turn it off?
The re-casing of keywords is a feature of "Pretty listing (reformatting) of code". This feature was less aggressive in VS versions earlier then VS2015 and did not run un-commenting a line.
To disable it go to:
Tools Menu->Options->Text Editor->Basic-> Advanced-> Editor help section
and uncheck "Pretty listing (reformatting) of code".

Trimming the leading THE in SQL results on Joomla module Articles Category

I am trying to trim the leading "the" in a query that returns the titles of articles in Joomla, so that results are displayed in alphabetical order and the leading "the", if present, is disregarded. The module responsible for this is the Article Category (which is Joomla core module) and the file I think I should modify is helper.php in modules/mod_articles_category.
I replace the following line:
$articles->setState('list.direction', $params->get('article_ordering_direction',
'ASC'));
With this:
$articles->setState('list.direction', $params->get('article_ordering_direction',
'TRIM(LEADING \'THE \' FROM a.title) ASC'));
However, if I enable the debug mode, the TRIM is not showing. SO I guess, that I need to make the change somewhere else. Sorry but I am not familiar with Joomla so don't really know where this query is coming from. Any pointer is very much appreciated.
Okay, the short answer is no, I don't believe you can modify a query from a module, just like this. I haven't worked with modules, but I have some experience with components, so I would suggest two approaches:
Try to query the database yourself from the module, not by using setState, but building the query yourself.
You can cheat. Since Joomla has already done the heavy lifting for you, you could just manipulate the result object (i.e. $list) rearranging it and stripping off whatever you don't want. I would also suggest that you treat your code as a layout override, that way you'll be able to update your site without overriding the changes you have made.

How to implement an NSTextView that performs on-the-fly markup to RTF conversions

I'm trying to build an NSTextView that can take "marked up" input that is automatically translated into beautiful RTF-style text while the user types.
The idea is to let the user enter text in "plain text" format, but to "beautify" it on the spot, e.g.
H1 A quick list:
* first item
* second item
would be translated into a first line with a header font, followed by a bulleted list.
I have found plenty of potential ways of doing this, but the Text System is incredibly complicated (with reason) and I don't want to start "cooking my own" if there is already something suitable built-in. BTW I would be happy with a Snow Leopard only API.
The first thing I thought of was "data detectors", but I can't find a public API for doing this.
Having reached the end of the road with that, I turned to the new "Text Input Sources API". This does all kinds of things, but the "data-driven input methods" section of the WWDC 2006 presentation "Take Charge of the Text Input" seems interesting in my context. Beyond that single presentation slide however nothing seems to exist anywhere, so it's a bit of a dead end again.
Finally, I had a look at the NSSpellChecker class which is also supposed to offer completion features and automatic corrections.. but I'm not sure how this could be re-purposed for my requirements either.
At the moment, I'm tempted to just re-parse the entire NSTextStorage manually and make the changes myself when the user stops typing.. but I'm sure there are cleverer heads around this forum..
Any advice or pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
Neither data detectors nor the spell checker are appropriate for this task. Assuming you're just looking for a way to pass the input to a parser/formatter you already have, interfacing with the text system isn't too difficult. You're on the right track with handling the editing to NSTextStorage.
Along those lines, there's no need to re-parse the entire thing when the user stops. The text system sends you the modified range and gives you the opportunity to act on those changes (and even reject them out of hand). Since all changes funnel through this (typing, pasting, dropping...), this is the point where you want to intercede.
Because you're dealing with headings and bulleted lists, I'd get the enclosing paragraph of the modified range. This gives you a nice, round unit of work that is easily discovered and perfectly fits what you're trying to accomplish.
Good luck!