Post title contradicts the quote Don. Moderation is one thing.. all for that. Using regions is not a code smell. It helps organize code. Using regions like in your sample, yeah, all against that.

You've forgotten the comment on the Foo property. Any well-coded system needs comments. Fortunately, I've gone the extra mile and written it for you:

///<summary>
/// Gets Foo
///</summary>

StyleCop sums up my feelings about regions quite nicely:


SA1109: BlockStatementsMustNotContainEmbeddedRegions

Cause: A C# statement contains a region tag between the declaration of the statement and the opening curly bracket of the statement.

Description: A violation of this rule occurs when the code contains a region tag in between the declaration and the opening curly bracket. This will result in the body of the statement being hidden when the region is collapsed.


SA1123: DoNotPlaceRegionsWithinElements

Cause: The C# code contains a region within the body of a code element.

Description: A violation of this rule occurs whenever a region is placed within the body of a code element. In many editors, including Visual Studio, the region will appear collapsed by default, hiding the code within the region. It is generally a bad practice to hide code within the body of an element, as this can lead to bad decisions as the code is maintained over time.


SA1124: DoNotUseRegions

Cause: The C# code contains a region.

Description: A violation of this rule occurs whenever a region is placed anywhere within the code. In many editors, including Visual Studio, the region will appear collapsed by default, hiding the code within the region. It is generally a bad practice to hide code, as this can lead to bad decisions as the code is maintained over time.


I agree with the title of your post: regions are most definitely a code smell. If you still can't find what you're looking for at a quick glance after collapsing all of the members in a file to their definitions (Ctrl+M, Ctrl+O), then your code probably needs to be refactored. There is almost always a way to increase the readability of a file without adding regions.