Comment helper macros (3)

At the company where I work (www.schlaps-automation.de),
we are still using the Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 for programming
16 Bit Windows applications (oh yes, there are customers who want programs for Windows
3.x). We are also using the Micosoft Programmers Workbench (PWB) as the IDE for this compiler.
Since you can enhance the PWB’s functionality with special extension libraries, several years
ago we wrote some useful helpers for the PWB. Time marches on and if you have to program
today for Win95/98/NT, life is easier if you are using Visual C++ and Visual Studio.
You can customize Visual Studio in many ways.
However, I missed some of the functions that I had used PWB.
Therefore, I decided to implement them as Visual Studio macros.
This article contains three (3) of these macros.

1) I like the C comment style where the comments are vertically aligned to the right
of the source code.


for(i=0;i<1000;i++) // search loop { if(c[i]==0) break; // empty space found ? done if(c[i]==1) c[i]=2; // replace 1 with 2 }

If you want to use this comment style, you spend a lot of time placing
the comments so that they align just right. And if you change one line of code,
you always have to re-adjust the comment so that it still aligns
properly.

Therefore, my first macro works by executing it while the cursor is
on the line where the comment will be added or adjusted.

You can even select more than one line of source code when
executing the macro. Every line will get a new comment sign
or the existing comments will be re-adjusted (if needed).


The biggest advantage this macro has over similar macros presented on Codeguru,
is that it will work with lines of code that already contain comments.

2) The second macro does just the opposite: it removes
single-line comments (not only the comment signs, but
also all text after the comment characters (//)
If you are using the “auto-comment” feature of the Visual
Studio and you are looking for an easy way to remove some
of the useless comments (or if you want to remove your own useless
comments :), just place the cursor on the offending line(s) of code
and execute this macro


3) I HATE TABS! The first thing I did in Visual Studio
was to disable the tab-chars. It4s a lot easier to navigate
in the source when spaces are used instead.

But if you are using the Wizard stuff, tabs will be inserted
in the generated code. So my last macro simply removes all
tabs from the source code and replaces them with spaces.

NOTE: It should be noted that my “comment” macros also
hate tabs. Therefore, you will need to run this macro first before
using my comment macros.

Date Last Updated: February 3, 1999

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