No ability to disable fading for unused private methods analyzer

[timheuer]

Summary

IDE00051 basically grays out unused private methods. Customers are not liking this but also don't want to disable the analyzer all together. It's the visual representation that is annoying. There are also areas where methods are used dynamically that analyzers don't know about.

Background and Motivation

We have other analyzers that 'fade' views, but we enable a toggle to disable the fade.

Proposed Feature

Add the ability to disable the fade with this analyzer

[raffaeler]

I started suppressing the IDE0051 with a GlobalSuppression.cs in my project but it’s time expensive and I don’t find this to be appropriate for some reasons:

1. This is my own choice. Other users may find the fade-out code useful. The GlobalSuppression.cs does not respect users’ choices
2. The Analyzer finds an “issue” but the way the IDE “notifies” this issue to the user should be left to the IDE and configured by the users (in Tools-Options)
3. There are several good reasons to keep away the fade-out from some methods as the are used dynamically or via interop. In this specific case, there is probably the need to pair this analyzer with an attribute informing the analyzer to ignore them.

Said that, I don’t like the current behavior at all.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

Seems reasonable to have an option here.

[raffaeler]

BTW, I hope we don't end up in only having to use an attribute to suppress it.
During the development, it's quite common to start writing code that isn't called yet. In this case you are still modifying the code which is grayed and very hard to read.
Before suppressing the IDE0051 in the file, I used to close VS and continue coding with VSCode, which is really a defeat for VS.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

BTW, I hope we don't end up in only having to use an attribute to suppress it.

As mentioned, it seems reasonable for there to be an option controlling this.

[sharwell]

@CyrusNajmabadi What about making the current "Fade out unreachable code" option apply to this as well?

[CyrusNajmabadi]

@sharwell i'm not opposed to that. both are conceptually 'unreachable' either because flow analysis says we can't reach a particular statement, or because there's no reference to some private member.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

We would take an appropriately sized community pr here.

[ddobric]

The current fade-out behaviour is disruptive. When writing new private methods, they are not immediately used, and I do not want them to be greyed out. However, the concept of fading out unused methods is excellent.

My recommendation is to include a menu item (possibly in the code analyzer) that allows developers to manually check for unused methods in the code. This approach aligns better with the typical development process.

[Dreamescaper]

Would it be possible to disable fading when the cursor or caret is on that code block?
I'm fine with fading unused code, but not when I'm actually writing it.