Small things matter

It's annoying when all of a sudden, a nice feature you do not want to miss in your IDE, appears to be broken. That can really ruin your day. Now, we know that such things happen when you upgrade your environment to the next major release - it can still be annoying as hell.

Visual Studio 2010 is now out for a few days and so far it looks good. I'm using VS mostly for C and C++ work and from that point of view, it works fine and I have not yet found major showstopper bugs. One thing, however, made me almost tear my hair out - the comment task list. Every developer knows this feature - it's a convenient little thing that aids you in not forgetting important tasks left unfixed or unfinished in your code. The IDE will scan the code for certain tags inside comments (for example: TODO) and for each tag it finds, it will create a task list item.

So far so good. This was always working in Visual Studio, but for some reason, it didn't in 2010. No matter what comment I typed or what tag (predefined or self-defined) I was using, the task list kept itself totally empty. First, I thought it was a bug, but then, while browsing the advanced editor settings (which are new in VS 2010), I found the culprit: The feature is disabled by default. The screenshot shows where the setting is hidden and I must say, it is, without doubt, well hidden :) Why it is disabled by default, I do not know and since I found only a few hits on the web regarding this problem, it might even be an installation issue that does not happen on everyone's system. But if it does for you, then here is the easy fix.

Simply open the options, navigate to Text Editor->C++->Formatting and enable the option Enumerate comment tasks under the Miscellaneous section.