Coding style per project

A few months ago, when I installed Visual Studio 2008 on my system, I opened one of my projects, did the usual project conversion, edited some files, created a few others, saved, tested, and checked in source control. Another developer working on the same project, also with VS2008, later edited some of the same files I had edited.

Then I went to do a diff to verify the changes and I saw what I always hate to see. He hadn't changed a lot of code, but he was using different style settings in VS and all the extra spaces around ifs, function arguments, etc were making it harder to find the important changes. To be fair, I was the one that forgot to adjust my default settings to be more compatible with our current coding style.

The situation above is not all that critical, but is certainly a big annoyance. Some diff programs will allow you to ignore white space differences but it is still sickening to see your source code with mixed code formatting style in the same file, sometimes in the same method.

That kept me thinking: why aren't code format style settings part of the project? Imagine if you work for two different clients, with different standards, or that you are a contributor to Open Source projects that also have different opinions about code format. It's too easy to forget to adjust your settings every time you switch projects, even if you export and save the appropriate VS settings to import as needed. Any IDE with so many options as VS should offer an option to save any settings that deal with the actual code be part of the project. A developer should be able to explicitly ignore or change the project settings but not by default.

With that problem in mind, I thought it would be useful to just adopt the practice of exporting the VS settings that are relevant to the project coding style and checking that in source control too. Here's what I did.

Fire up the the Import and Export settings wizard and choose only the settings that relate to code formatting and for the languages the project uses, for example C#, HTML, and XML. In this case we will just do the C# settings.

Right here we hit a limitation in VS. There's no way to select only the code formatting settings for C#, so we will export all of them anyway. Once we do that, save the file to the project directory (like MyProject.vssettings) and add it to the project or solution. Open it in VS (it's just XML) an stare at the plethora of settings that are saved.

<UserSettings>
	  <ApplicationIdentity version="9.0"/>
	  <ToolsOptions>
	    <ToolsOptionsCategory name="TextEditor"
	    RegisteredName="TextEditor">
	      <ToolsOptionsSubCategory name="CSharp"
	    RegisteredName="CSharp" PackageName="Text Management Package">
	        <PropertyValue name="TabSize">4</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="AutoListMembers">true</PropertyValue>
	        <!-- ...(snip)... -->
	        <PropertyValue name="AutoListParams">true</PropertyValue>
	      </ToolsOptionsSubCategory>
	      <ToolsOptionsSubCategory name="CSharp-Specific"
	    RegisteredName="CSharp-Specific"
	    PackageName="Visual C# Language Service Package">
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_QueryExpression_EachClause">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_Normalize">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="WarnWhenMembersCauseCompilerGeneratedReferences">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="CollapseInactiveBlocksOnOpen">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Watson_MaxExceptionsToReport">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="EditAndContinueReportEnterBreakStateFailure">1</PropertyValue>
	        <!-- ...(snip)... -->
	        <PropertyValue name="RemoveUnusedUsings">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Rename_Overloads">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="EncapsulateField_SearchInComments">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="ProgressDialogDelaySeconds">2</PropertyValue>
	      </ToolsOptionsSubCategory>
	    </ToolsOptionsCategory>
	  </ToolsOptions>
	</UserSettings>

Upon closer inspection, we can more or less recognize each settings by their names. Let's remove the ones that don't seem to be related to code formatting. This is more or less a value judgment on the importance of some of the settings. My choice was to keep TabSize, IndentStyle, and InsertTabs in the first subcategory and, for the second subcategory, I'm keeping any of the setting whose name starts with NewLines_, Indent_, or Space_ and also the item named SortUsings.(I should probably just write a macro to do that at some point)

After all this sanitizing, my settings file is reduced to the following:

<UserSettings>
	  <ApplicationIdentity version="9.0"/>
	  <ToolsOptions>
	    <ToolsOptionsCategory name="TextEditor"
	    RegisteredName="TextEditor">
	      <ToolsOptionsSubCategory name="CSharp"
	    RegisteredName="CSharp" PackageName="Text Management Package">
	        <PropertyValue name="TabSize">4</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="IndentStyle">2</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="InsertTabs">true</PropertyValue>
	      </ToolsOptionsSubCategory>
	      <ToolsOptionsSubCategory name="CSharp-Specific"
	    RegisteredName="CSharp-Specific"
	    PackageName="Visual C# Language Service Package">
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_QueryExpression_EachClause">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_Normalize">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_AroundBinaryOperator">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_Braces_Method">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Indent_CaseLabels">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_Braces_ControlFlow">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_Braces_AnonymousMethod">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_WithinOtherParentheses">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_AfterBasesColon">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Indent_Braces">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_WithinMethodCallParentheses">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_AfterCast">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_Braces_CollectionInitializer">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_AnonymousTypeInitializer_EachMember">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_Keywords_Catch">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_Braces_ObjectInitializer">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_Braces_ArrayInitializer">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_WithinExpressionParentheses">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_InControlFlowConstruct">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_BetweenEmptyMethodDeclarationParentheses">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Indent_UnindentLabels">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="SortUsings">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_ObjectInitializer_EachMember">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_WithinMethodDeclarationParentheses">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_BetweenEmptyMethodCallParentheses">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_BeforeSemicolonsInForStatement">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_BeforeComma">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_AfterMethodCallName">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_AfterComma">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_BeforeBasesColon">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_AfterMethodDeclarationName">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_AfterDot">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_Braces_Type">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_AfterLambdaArrow">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_Braces_LambdaExpressionBody">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_WithinSquares">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_BeforeLambdaArrow">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="NewLines_Braces_AnonymousTypeInitializer">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_WithinCastParentheses">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_AfterSemicolonsInForStatement">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Indent_CaseContents">1</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Indent_FlushLabelsLeft">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_BetweenEmptySquares">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_BeforeOpenSquare">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Space_BeforeDot">0</PropertyValue>
	        <PropertyValue name="Indent_BlockContents">1</PropertyValue>
	      </ToolsOptionsSubCategory>
	    </ToolsOptionsCategory>
	  </ToolsOptions>
	</UserSettings>

It sucks that I still have to remember to load the settings for each project before making changes in that project, but at least I don't have to remember which individual settings to use for each project.

How do you handle this situation? Do you just live with the inconsistencies or is there an alternative way to deal with this issue? Are you using StyleCop (a.k.a. MS Source Analysis) or something like it to enforce some or all of the rules?