If this feature does not exist, I would like to register it as a much-needed feature request.

I am looking for a very simple feature which displays the number of characters I have highlighted on the screen in the code editor.  Many editors, such as the wonderful Notepad++, and I find myself transfering text into that editor just to count the number of characters.

An example of when I need this feature:  I am declaring a new StringBuilder, and I want to give the buffer a default size, so that it doesn't need to increase unnecessarily.  I highlight the block of text that will be the approximate final contents of the StringBuilder, and add a hundred extra bytes or so, depending on the specific needs of the operation.  This should be a simple matter, but I can't find a way to do it in VS2005 right now.

Does anyone have a solution?  If not, can it be added to a suggested feature list?

Thanks!

You can create a Macro, then place that macro in your tool bar and/or menus in order to have it readily available.  You can also configure it with a hot key combination.

Here's the code for a quick and dirty macro, but you may run into problems if you have spacing between lines (i.e., indentions in your code.):

Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports System.Diagnostics
Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic

Public Module Module1

    Sub CountSelection()
        Dim str As String = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text()
        Microsoft.VisualBasic.MsgBox("Number of Characters Counted: " & vbCrLf & _
             str.Length, MsgBoxStyle.OkOnly, "Number Of Selected Characters")
    End Sub

End Module

Fantastic, thanks very much!

I tested it, and it seems to do the trick nicely.  If I run into problems, I'll just make the counting mechanism more robust by using Regular Expressions.

Thanks again -- for the very quick and helpful assistance!

Sweet jeez Ps2, nice trick from your hat. Where can I learn about that..

I learned it because I wanted to-- I had to clean up some code recently, and I knew I could extend the environment with macros.  One of the things I wanted to do in particular was remove the casing for parameters that were stored in the database.  That way, I could compare the parameter in the database to a version that was in all lower case, to prevent typing errors.  With over 50 parameters and adding, this would have been a bear, sense most parameters are camel-cased in the DB.  So I spent some time with macros to save me time in the future!

I looked a little bit into Visual Studio Extensibility using macros on the MSDN site (Main macro how-to page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8h31zbch(VS.80).aspx), and there were also a few samples in the IDE that made learning by example easy. 

For the samples, Open the Macro Explorer (View->Other Windows -> Macro Explorer), and there should be a module called 'Samples'.  You can view the code for these by right-clicking any of them and choosing 'Edit'.

Thanks mate...