In this repository, we use various different formatting conventions depending on who owns the code. Additionally, we use different formatting tools depending on if the code is managed C# or VB code or if the code is native C or C++ code.
To help enable an easy workflow and reduce the number of formatting changes requested, this document provides steps to download and enable the various different tools in different development environments to enable a seamless workflow for ensuring that keeping code formatted is a pleasant experience.
C# and VB code in the repository use the built-in Roslyn support for EditorConfig to enable auto-formatting in many IDEs. As a result, no additional tools are required to enable keeping your code formatted. You can also use the dotnet format command from the dotnet SDK to do formatting or use the git pre-commit hook mentioned later in this document.
To download the formatting tools for C++, run the download-tools.ps1/sh script in the eng/formatting folder. Specifically, run the download-tools.ps1 script if you're on Windows, or the download-tools.sh script otherwise.
This script will download the clang-format and clang-tidy tools to the artifacts/tools folder in your clone of the repository. Only specific parts of the repository use clang-tidy, so this document primarily focuses on setting up clang-format for C and C++ scenarios.
The JIT team uses a special jit-format tool that runs clang-format and clang-tidy on their directory with their settings. You can get the jit-format tool from the dotnet/jitutils repository.
To make the formatting workflow more seamless for contributors, instructions are included below to help enable "format-on-save" or other forms of automatic formatting in various different IDEs or as a Git pre-commit hook for IDEs that do not support "format-on-save" scenarios.
This section is open to contributions for instructions on how to enable "format-on-save"-like semantics in IDEs and editors not mentioned.
Enabling a "format-on-save" experience in VSCode is quite easy. Add the following setting to your .vscode/settings.json file to enable "format-on-save":
"editor.formatOnSave": true,The sections below include any additional instructions to configure the experience for different languages.
There are currently some limitations in OmniSharp that causes issues with the auto-formatting. Once a VSCode C# extension releases with both OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn#2227 and dotnet/vscode-csharp#4738, then format-on-save should be possible to enable in VSCode for C# and Visual Basic sources.
VSCode ships with a different version of clang-format than we use in this repo, so you will need to add a few more settings to get VSCode to run the correct clang-format for "format-on-save".
You can add the following setting on Windows to your .vscode/settings.json file to configure clang-format for the repository:
"C_Cpp.clang_format_path": "./artifacts/tools/clang-format.exe"On non-Windows, you can add the following setting instead:
"C_Cpp.clang_format_path": "./artifacts/tools/clang-format"Visual Studio does not have a "format-on-save" feature but it does have settings for "format on end of statement" or "format on end of block" that can provide some auto-formatting features.
Using these features in combination with the steps specified in the Git Hooks section will enable a seamless formatting experience.
The settings for C#, VB, C, and C++ are all in a dialog under the Tools > Options menu item.
In the options view, go to Text Editor > C# > Code Style > Formatting > General for C# settings. Make sure to check the various options for whenever you want Visual Studio to auto-format your code.
In the options view, go to Text Editor > C/C++ > Code Style > Formatting > General for C# settings. Make sure to check the various options for whenever you want Visual Studio to auto-format your code.
Git provides a number of hooks to enable running scripts before commit, push, pull, etc. This section describes adding a pre-commit hook to automatically format code before committing to make formatting seamless even when your development environment doesn't support "format-on-save" or similar functionality with the formatting tools this repository uses.
To enable auto-formatting before committing, you can create a .git/hooks/pre-commit file in your local dotnet/runtime clone and add a call to the script located at eng/formatting/format.sh to auto-format your code before committing. Since Git for Windows also installs Git Bash, this script will work for both Windows and non-Windows platforms.
The following code block can be used as the contents of the pre-commit file to enable the auto-formatting hook:
#!/bin/sh
./eng/formatting/format.sh