How to mark important areas of code in Visual Studio?

Question

We all sometimes have to write potentially dangerous, insecure, or simply poorly written code fragments. This is usually done in a hurry and needs to be rewritten later.

My question is: how can I easily and visually label this code in VS 2008?

For example, I use the Mindjet MindManager for planning, and I like how easily I can put a predefined graphic marker on any topic: a red flag for “dangerous!”, A half-filled square for “50%”, etc. Then I can configure the filter and see that all my topics are marked as “important” or all topics with a progress> 75%.

I want to have something like this in Visual Studio. I know about the comments of "TODO:", but they do not have any markers and cannot be filtered by their value.

Answer 1

Take a look at Tools-> Options → Environment, Task List. He has:

• Hack
• Todo
• canceled
• UnresolvedMergeConflict

The first three have priority "Normal", the last has high priority. They can be sorted in the task list (View-> Task List). They can be customized and you can add your own.

ReSharper goes further by resolving keywords with regular expressions and appearing with a specific color and icon in its explorer.

Answer 2

I use “TODO”, followed by the priority indicator “P1”, “P2”, etc. Then I can sort the TODO list in the correct order.

Answer 3

Let the compiler give warnings:

#if RELEASE #warning This has to rewritten later #endif 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/963th5x3(VS.71).aspx