Re: LPEX tasks & iSphere - just looking at this and some thoughts

Hey Buck - thx for your thoughts. Responses inline

On 8/31/2015 10:54 AM, Buck Calabro wrote:

On 8/31/2015 10:51 AM, Vernon Hamberg wrote:

When turned on, it pulls lines with the text '// TODO', for example, and
displays them in a Tasks view, from which you can double click the task
and open the source it came from.

Seems nice enough - but you can't mark these auto-listed tasks as
complete, therefore you can't remove completed ones from the list. This
is apparently by design of Eclipse.

I'm wondering just how useful this is - for awhile this morning I
thought it was not so good - then I just had the thought that maybe the
idea is to remove the tag line from source when the thing is done.

Does that line up with anyone's thoughts here?

Yep. I no longer need a TODO after I've done it :-) Typically, I'll
write a TODO comment that's a very brief synopsis of the work that's
needed, then below that I'll write the comments which will describe the
actual work. I find that writing the comments before the code tends to
channel the comments toward describing the intent, which will probably
survive several iterations worth of mods. Anyway, when I've actually
written the implementing code, I simply delete the TODO comment.

This makes sense - someone on the net suggested creating a 2nd task identifier, DONE, and replace TODO with DONE in the code. Maybe, eh?

Now I do see online that one can add tasks directly from the marker bar
- you know, that narrow thing on the left that sometimes has warning
triangles and breakpoints and all. I've begun to use it a l lot when RDi
detects a syntax error, then I see what's going on - pretty cool, IMO.

The tasks entered this way are not written into the source, I see, and
they do show up in the Tasks view, with the ability to mark as complete,
either by checking the checkbox you now see or using the context menu.

Now this is starting to get interesting, I think - so I'm curious about
y'all's experiences with this.

Try it out by right-clicking the marker bar on the left of a source
member - I don't think the iSphere stuff has anything to do with that,
but Thomas can confirm.

I didn't like that as much as the TODO comments, but that's just me.
I'm sure that some people prefer the out of band task list, but when my
mind is in the code I like my eyes to be in the code too. I tend to
maximise the editor window when I'm really cranking along, so I don't
see the Tasks view all that much.

As to the out-of-band list - when I create a task of the marker bar, there's a little icon there, so I do see there is a task - there is no need for the Tasks view in this case.