Simple, But Super Useful, CFBuilder 2 Enhancement: Task and TODO Support

One of the things that I liked a lot about CFEclipse was its support for TODO tags in your code. You enter a comment like:

<!--- TODO: Clean up database call --->

And the CFEclipse parser would see that TODO string and make a task out of that comment and put that task in the Tasks view in Eclipse. This serves as a really handy way of keeping track of the small tasks you need to get done while working on a new feature for an application. It doesn't replace a dedicated ticketing and task tracking system, but it's quite useful.

For reasons I either don't remember or never learned, this feature never made its way into ColdFusion Builder 1. It was an annoyance as I used the TODO task support as part of my development workflow.

Now that the beta of ColdFusion Builder 2 is out, TODO task support has thankfully been added. By default, CFBuilder 2 makes tasks out of comments that begin with TODO or FIXME. You can add additional task types by going to Preferences > ColdFusion > Profiles > Editor > Task Tags. Open up the Tasks view (in the "View" menu), and you'll see all your TODOs and FIXMEs and REFACTORs (or whatever task tags you create) listed there.

I find that while I don't necessarily create tickets in our ticketing/tracking system for all the sub-tasks that go into creating a new feature or enhancing an existing feature, I use TODOs as a tracking system for all the sub-tasks in CFBuilder itself. This way, I can review existing code, plan out my changes using TODOs or similar tags, and then see all of the things I need to do in the Tasks view. This is especially useful when changes span multiple files.

There's a lot of new stuff in CFBuilder 2, but this is one that you can start to use with little effort and definite reward.