Dear Visual Studio 2003,

It is with much respect and admiration that I politely make the following request: please quit reformatting my code.

I've heard that this have been fixed in your younger brother, Visual Studio 2005, but unfortunately, I can't upgrade to 2005 because (a) it's not "officially" out yet, and (b) I'm on a team of developers and Lord only knows what kind of incompatibilities would exist when trying to run both versions.

If there is anything you can do to service pack this reformatting "feature" out, or a hidden setting I can make to keep this from happening, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks for your time,
Ric Castagna

In all seriousness, this has got to be one of the most frustrating things that happens in VS2003. I know I'm not the only one that has experienced the frustration of this. You would think that M$ would have listened to their customers...oh, wait...why even bother completing that sentence. I know that M$ doesn't listen to anyone, anyway.

Actually, this isn't all M$'s fault, either. There is one control out there - specifically FreeTextBox - that has some of the oddest behavior when being reformatted by VS2003. All of a sudden, and "ID" attribute appears for the FTB <TOOLBARS> tag which is not supported by the FTB codebase so when you try to compile/run your project, you get an error thrown. Then you have to go into the HTML and take out the ID attrib before it will run properly. I guess this also means that you can't programmatically add to the TOOLBARS, but I digress. I just wish we didn't have to use that particular piece of...code...yeah, that's the word I was going to use...in our app.

OK, now that I'm done ranting, I'm going to go back to reformatting the code that VS2003 just screwed up (again) and continue cursing FreeTextBox.