Tooling needs focus rather than new features

[afallingstone]

I’m writing this because the past year and a half have been incredibly frustrating. It appears that Razor is an afterthought in the .NET update process.

Every new update seems to bring a new list of issues with Razor. I understand that the idea of having Razor house C#, HTML, and CSS in a single page or component is quite magical. In my opinion, it’s the perfect solution.

But I’ve reached a point where I don’t care about new features; I just want the tooling to actually work. Every new release brings issues with IntelliSense, coloring, anchor tags, hyperlinking (Command Click), hover tooltip information, text formatting, parsing solution issues, and general typing problems.

Here are some issues that are posted by myself and other users that just need to be fixed.

• blazor completion in vs removes the @ symbol for events #11395
• Typing ??<space> in a razor method inserts from the completion list #11381
• Razor override completion is not working #11321
• Razor markup including parameters and on space word replacement. #11290
• Razor shouldn't show intellisense inside HTML comments #10937
• Completing @for with ( enters the wrong completion item #11110

Lastly, let me clarify that I’m a macOS user writing a Blazor web app using Visual Studio Code, but all these issues are constant problems. Even though I still experience all the problems above, I am using 3 versions old C# Dev Kit because Razor has been completely broken in the last few releases.

These problems need to be fixed, please 🙏

[ryzngard]

@afallingstone thanks for your candid feedback while being respectful. We definitely welcome our community letting us know their frustrations! I'll take a look through these issues today on my mac and confirm/deny they still exist. Completion fixes have been a heavy focus lately (special thanks to @alexgav for being a rockstar on those!) and seems to occupy a lot of your list.

In general, our focus has been on architectural changes and fixes that moves razor tooling to be higher quality. Some of these changes have led to regressions that weren't previously caught in our testing (which we're also improving!). New features have been a marginal portion of our work depending on team expertise and availability. Some things that may seem like new features, such as the new tokenizer changes, are actually a large part of us to making everything in Razor/Blazor more reliable and predictable. The fact that it also brings over some new features is awesome but not always the goal.

[ryzngard]

Here's my local testing results (which should be in the next pre-release version) on my M1 mac

• blazor completion in vs removes the @ symbol for events #11395
• Typing ??<space> in a razor method inserts from the completion list #11381
• Razor override completion is not working #11321
• Razor markup including parameters and on space word replacement. #11290
• Razor shouldn't show intellisense inside HTML comments #10937
• Completing @for with ( enters the wrong completion item #11110

So we're not done, but we're getting there :) I won't be closing these issues as further testing is need on windows/linux and VS instead of VS Code. Just trying to give you some hope that we're both listening and reacting.

[afallingstone]

I really appreciate the quick response. I can be available to do some testing if needed, as well.

Currently the latest release is broken.

• Tooltips says loading then fails.
• Coloring problems.
• No intellisense.
• hyperlinking is broken.

.cs files work correctly though.

[oakad]

By the way, rzls is really heavy on the CPU. Opening a razor project means listening to cooling fans for hours (at least on Linux). Other ls implementations don't bear nearly so heavy even on much larger projects.

[Mike-E-angelo]

Opening a razor project means listening to cooling fans for hours (at least on Linux).

Very much the same on Windows too. And that's before ReSharper gets a hold of it. 😬 I feel like I have been running a cryptocurrency mining rig for the past five years as I "develop." 😅

That said, it has gotten better over time in key areas. Build acceleration is especially nice now and I am able to F5 out changes in several seconds whereas in the past it was minutes. So, thank you to the team out there for all your efforts. 🙏

[ryzngard]

FWIW we did a recent improvement that should help by using pull diagnostics in vs code to reduce unnecessary CPU churn dotnet/vscode-csharp#8058

It should be in the next prerelease version.