A couple of days ago I was annoyed that Resharper was insisting on turning my abstract base NUnit test class with nothing in it but a shared [SetUp] method into a one line class with a collapsed Setup / Teardown region in it. While I didn't always feel this way, my experience has taught me that regions are a smell in your code. They are a way to hide things you don't want to deal with or look at. It's kind of like putting makeup over a melanoma instead of having a doctor remove it. Here'sa pretty good analysis of why regions are a code smellif you're interested.

So anyway, I'm using Resharper and am in general a huge fan, and I know I can configure this thing every which way, but I look through the options and nothing jumps out at me about how to adjust Region settings for NUnit tests. I manually removed the region and checked in my code and, rather than spending more time and effort researching a solution, griped about it on twitter today. Not long after, Todd Ropog let me know about this:

Prevent Resharper from adding Regions to Interfaces

Chris outlines the steps nicely:

• Go to ReSharper | Options
• In the left explorer pane, find Language | C# | Formatting Style | Type Members Layout
• Uncheck "Use Default Patterns"
• A huge nasty XML document appears. As Kyle mentions, Don't Panic.

This is why I never found what I was looking for – if you don't uncheck the “Use Default Patterns” checkbox, you never even see the XML used. Once you see this:

you're pretty much there. All you need to do is look for things that say:

<Group><br />  <Name <span class="attr">Region="Some Region Name"/><br /></Group>

and remove them. You can remove the whole if you like, but if it's doing other things like and you want it to continue doing that, you're better off just removing the or 's contents.

So, to sum up:

• Regions can indicate a code smell and should be used sparingly.
• Resharper is a fabulous tool…
• • …but it's so darned flexible that finding how to do some things can be hard.
• Twitter can be a great way to get other people to tell you how to do things you don't know how to do.
• Hopefully this helps a few people Googling/Binging or having their friends Tweet how to remove regions from Resharper code cleanup in the future.