[moron4hire]

I'm not sure that it would be that difficult with Roslyn and Visual Studio these days. There are Roslyn-based syntax-highlighters and linters and snippet-generators and code-transformers. I use one for making sure all of my code is not just formatted the way I want it, but auto-inserting "readonly" modifiers for fields that don't get re-written outside of the constructor, one that treats not implementing IDisposable correctly as an error (it can also track the lifetime of a Disposable object and warn when it detects that it never gets disposed, which is super cool), and another one that rainbow-highlights code blocks. The tooling is there to support just a thing, it just needs someone to put all the pieces together.

[eropple]

Hey, that's cool. Sounds like things have really improved. Maybe next time I get back into C# I'll see about writing the gizmo I want, if somebody else hasn't already. Thanks a lot.

(If somebody has--well, I wouldn't mind some lazyweb recommentations...)

[thrower123]

What is the name of that IDisposable checking one? That sounds very, very useful.

[moron4hire]

I think the easiest way to set it all up is to manually edit your CSProj files, especially if you are still building .NET Framework projects. By default, Visual Studio will only create the new SDK Style project file format for .NET Standard and .NET Core projects, but it's still usable for .NET Framework projects if you manually change the format. Once you change it, it sticks, so you can use VS to edit the config after that, but it's still pretty easy to edit by hand now.

So here is my base project config: https://github.com/capnmidnight/Juniper/blob/master/Juniper....

The most important part is the first PropertyGroup sets values for all build configs, in particular is setting LangVersion to 8.0. Framework 4.8 taps out at C# 7.2, but you can use most of the C# 8.0 features, including fully async streams if you manually set the language version. Features that aren't available are some minor things like the array ranges and indexing: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe...

And here are my base project with the analyzers I use: https://github.com/capnmidnight/Juniper/blob/master/Juniper....

They're all ones provided directly from Microsoft, though there are a bunch more from other vendors: https://www.nuget.org/packages?q=analyzer

Then here is an example project using that targets file: https://github.com/capnmidnight/Juniper/blob/master/src/Juni...

You can see just how much the new SDK Style project file format simplifies things. There is no importing of any base Targets files hidden deep in Visual Studio's install directory anymore.

I manually import the .props and .targets file instead of using Directory.Build.props and Directory.Build.targets because I have other projects that use these configs, included via a git submodule.

Here is my .editorconfig file, where I set most of the rules related to Disposable types to errors: https://github.com/capnmidnight/Juniper/blob/master/.editorc...

And this Visual Studio extension makes .editorconfig files a lot nicer to work with: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MadsKris...

(BTW, I pretty much install all of Mads Kristensen's extensions)

And while I'm here, I'll give a shout-out to Viasfora for its syntax highlighting modifications that rainbow-highlight code blocks: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TomasRes...

And VSColorOutput for making the Output window in Visual Studio actually readable: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MikeWard...