Archive for June, 2007

Disabling the Spell Check Feature

Posted June 6th, 2007
Filed Under: Tips, Spellcheck

This question has come up a lot recently. Some people love the integrated spell checking, others hate it. The number one comment we get regarding this feature is the flagging of variable names as spelling errors.

The reasoning here was that variable names should be meaningful words, rather than abbreviations or random letters. This produces more meaningful code that is easier to read. The spell check engine is smart enough to understand camel case, so standard programmer idioms can still be applied. However, realizing that this isn’t for everyone, you do have a couple of options. To configure spell checking, bring up the options panel for Studio Tools from the Visual Studio menu:

Tools | Options

First, you can set Comments Only to true, disabling spell checking inside the code itself.

Alternatively, you can set As-You-Type Spell Checking to false to disable it all together.

You can always execute a manual spell check from the Studio Tools | Spelling menu.

Hopefully this clears up some confusion. We’d love your comments on this feature. For example, should the default state be to only spell check inside of comments? Are there other rules we should teach the engine about that would make the code level spell checking more useful?

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