Code regions not allowed within method bodies in VB.NET?

Question

Note: This "feature" has now been added to Visual Studio 2015 but the question will hold a while since not every developer or every dev shop gets access to the latest and greatest IDE as soon as it comes out.

ORIGINAL QUESTION:

Normally I wouldn't "need" or even consider a ridiculous feature such as code regions within method bodies but: I'm refactoring VB.NET code where methods routinely run five hundred lines of code or more and the references are so tightly coupled that the code defies simple refactoring such as method extraction.

And that's why I thought I would try regions within a method body. I just wanted to organize the code for the short term. But the IDE doesn't let me (resulted in a compiler error.) I'm just curious as to why? Seems like code regions shouldn't impact the compiler, intellisense etc. Am I missing something? (Still using VS 2005 btw.)

Interesting: This seems to be language specific. It's OK in C# (I didn't check that initially) but not in VB.NET.

public module MyModule     Sub RunSnippet()         dim a as A = new A (Int32.MaxValue )          #region          Console.WriteLine ("")         #end region        .... 

that gets a compiler error but the C# version is ok.

Answer 1

I think code regions probably wouldn't be supported in method bodies since they, as you put it, would be a (somewhat) "ridiculous feature" - However, in C#, this does work, at least in VS 2008 and VS 2010 - just not in VB.NET.

That being said, I would avoid it. Putting regions within a method body would just leads to people making larger methods (since that's the only time when it would be worthwhile), which is something that should be avoided, not encouraged.

If your code:

defies simple refactoring such as method extraction

I would focus, instead, on doing "complex" refactoring (or whatever it takes) to try to break up those methods. There is no way your "four or five hundred lines" long methods are at all maintainable in their current state.

Personally, I would leave them causing "pain" - make it obvious that they need work, right front and center, until you can break them up and refactor out portions.

Answer 2

Another simple alternative method:

What you can do is basically select the code you want to add the #Region #End Region and basically click:

Ctrl+M, Ctrl+H

This basically wraps the code. And then to make it even neater and easy to find you can comment the code. The end result would look something like this: