Visual Studio - automatically add necessary spaces to comments

Question

When I'm writing comments in my code, I often forget to add the initial space after the comment identifier.

'this is a comment

when really it is supposed to be

' this is a comment

I realize this is quite trivial, and you could simply say "just add the damn space you idiot", but I'd really like to automate this so that I just don't have to worry about it.

Can anyone point me in the right direction of an elegant way to add the comment space?

note I do realize that a catch all string replace or regex replace could screw up other things ... IE:

Dim something As String = "I'm a nerd"

would actually come out

Dim something As String = "I' m a nerd"

So the way I see this being resolved is if it's only on a line by it's self and is not followed by a second single quote... IE: '' would not trigger the replacement.

Answer 1

You could always get a copy of resharper and one of the rules in there is what you are describing. Once you finish with your code you can do a format on the whole file or even solution and it will globally fix that rule for you.

Answer 2

This would be a pretty good case for an editor extension. You can detect when a line is whitespace, apostrophe, not white space and either insert the space or put a decoration so you will learn to follow the pattern. If you've moved to 2010, consider it - they are really pretty easy to write.