Can I change how VS2008 generates certain items?

chobo2 · October 8th, 2008, 04:06 PM

Hi

there is a couple things in VS2008 that are driving me crazy. One for instance is when you generate a class it does not put anything infront of it(private,public,internal or whatever).

class CipherText
{
}

So that's is what it looks like I just read it apparently gets "internal" for it's view. The article I read said that this is fine for like 90% of the time. For me however I had to change one of my classes to public because I kept getting that "this class is less accessible then another classes error".

Took me forever to figure out that the class needed to be public. I don't really understand why they don't make it public in the first place. I noticed in my book too every time they did something they always had "public" specified what lead me to believe that vs2008 should have generated it when the class was made and mine was not.

Also if you have a file in like 2 different folders can't you just import the folder as a using package? Would that be the same as making one of them public?

Is there away to change it to display internal when the class is made? I don't like when stuff gets left out. I just find it easier to see stuff at face value and not have to recall that if left of in this place it defaults to internal but if you got a method and leave of the access modifier(or whatever you call private,public) it defaults to private.

So can I change that? Same with like when vs2008 generates your own customer event handler in code behind it drops of the private can you force it to display that too?

Thanks

samjudson · October 8th, 2008, 04:16 PM

Classes, properties and fields all default to private (not internal).

You also seem to be confusing the concept of folders with namespaces. The "using" keyword allows you to reference classes in one namespace (similar in idea to the idea of packages from java, but not quite the same in implementation). Files in the same folder do not need to be in the same namespace, but certainly if they are ten you can add a single using statement that will add them all.

Code:

namespace Test
{
   public class Class1
   {
   }
}

and then

Code:

using Test;

Also, the feature you are trying to find is "Visual Studio Templates". These can be modified, but I really wouldn't recommend modifying the defaults. You could however add a new template called "Public C# Class" or something.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6db0hwky.aspx

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/