Why doesn't Visual Studio code formatting work properly for Razor markup?

ProfK picture ProfK · Aug 1, 2011 · Viewed 31.2k times · Source

Or, should I rather ask, when will VS code formatting work properly for Razor markup? The formatting works for most structures, but it seems to choke on 'if' blocks. The code below is as it is formatted by VS. It is very easy to fix this case, with one more indent, but I nicely accepted the formatting in everyday use, and like to use it often for the bulk of my code, so I'd rather avoid manual formatting if possible. Right now I just leave it as VS formats it.

@{ 
    if (User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
    {
    <text>Hello </text>
    @Html.Display("@ViewBag.UserName") <text> - </text>
    @Html.ActionLink("Sign Out", "LogOff", "Account", null, new { style = "font-weight: bold;" })
    }
 }

I think it's important for readability that, e.g. in the above, the body of the if block is indented, besides just looking nicer.

Answer

Charles Burns picture Charles Burns · Aug 1, 2011

Be sure to set the editor to use space characters and not tabs. The editor seems to completely lose its mind when tabs are used. This is a shame because all those space characters end up in the actual HTML output, greatly increasing the data transfer size. What I do is manually supplement the automatic formatting as I type. Not ideal, but hopefully Microsoft will have this figured out for the next service pack.