Warn About TODOs

Download this extension from the VS Marketplace or install as an analyzer from NuGet.

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Visual Studio automatically takes code comments that include TODO and turns them into User Tasks that are displayed on the Task List. This takes those same tasks and also creates warnings for them.
This tool can be useful if you don't look at the Task List or want an extra reminder to do something before committing a change.

Works for single-line, multi-line, and documentation comments in both VB.Net and C#.

Configuration

The default behavior is to create a warning about any comment line that starts with TODO.

Simple configuration

This can be overridden by including an AdditionalFile in the project called todo-warn.config. If this file exists, warnings will only be reported for comments that start with any of the non-blank lines in that file.

A todo-warn.config file can also be specified in your user's ApplicationData directory. (You can get to this by entering %appdata% in the File Explorer address bar.) Project-level configurations will override the user level configuration if they exist.

For example, if the config file contained the line TODO BEFORE CHECK-IN, only comments that start that way are reported.

Advanced configuration

It is possible to control the type of error that is reported and filter beyond just how a comment starts.

Setting the output type

A line in the config file may, optionally, start with one of the following.

[INFO] - which will cause any comment identified by the rest of the line to be reported as information/message.
[ERROR] - which will cause any comment identified by the rest of the line to be reported as an error. Errors reported in this way will not cause a build to fail as they are separate from the build process.
[WARN] - which will cause any comment identified by the rest of the line to be reported as a warning. This is the same as not including any of these output indicators.

Filtering output by line content

In addition to a config file line containing plain text, that is treated as the line start value to use when identifying comments of interest, it is also possible for a line in a config file to be comprised of "config blocks."

A config block takes the format [KEYWORD(value)].

The following keywords are supported

• STARTS
• CONTAINS
• DOESNOTCONTAIN
• MATCHESREGEX

Each config block is optional but must be listed in the order shown above and can only be included once.

This allows for the creation of rules such as "Show a message if a comment starting 'TODO' includes an issue number but isn't 'low-priority'." It would look like:
[INFO][STARTS(TODO)][CONTAINS(Issue#)][DOESNOTCONTAIN(low-priority)].

Or you could have an error displayed if a comment line included, at any point, the text "before check-in" with the line [ERROR][CONTAINS(before check-in)].

Excluding files from output

If you do not wish a warning to be raised in a specific file (or files) this can be achieved with the [EXCLUDE] instruction.

Specify a line in the config that starts with [EXCLUDE] followed by the name of the file to exclude. e.g.

[EXCLUDE]Program.cs

This will prevent the reporting of any file named "Program.cs" or has a name that ends this way and so will, for example, also matches "MyProgram.cs". To match the filename exactly, include the path separator, like so [EXCLUDE]\Program.cs

A single wild card (*) can be included in the path and one is assumed at the start. The following lines are treated as identical.

[EXCLUDE]\Program.cs
[EXCLUDE]*\Program.cs

Adding a wildcard at the end of the instruction can be useful to exclude all files in a directory. The following would prevent the reporting of warnings about any files in the "Controllers" directory, including in any sub-directory.

[EXCLUDE]\Controllers\*

A wildcard can also be included in the middle of the text. The following prevents reporting of warnings about any file in the "Views" directory that ends with "Page" and has the ".cs" extension.

[EXCLUDE]\Views\*Page.cs

Multiple exclusion instructions can be specified in the config file and if any match the full path of a file being analyzed it will prevent any warnings for that file being reported.

Example configuration

The following are all examples of valid lines in a config file.

TO DO
[WARN]temp
[WARN]for-review
[WARN]for review
[ERROR][CONTAINS(before check-in)]
[WARN][STARTS(TODO)][DOESNOTCONTAIN(Issue#)]
[INFO][STARTS(TODO)][CONTAINS(Issue#)][DOESNOTCONTAIN(low-priority)]
[EXCLUDE]Config\*.cs
[MATCHESREGEX(Issue #[\d]+)]