I had been noticing that the pile of control events that execute in response to a button click were rearranging themselves when i wasn't looking.
(this would have been easier to figure out if the grid controls used to implement the direct editor don't allow sorting by more than one field. in other words, if the sorting algorithm took the current display order into account, then one could simply click on the "Ordering" field, then the "Control" field, then the "dialog" field and achieve a useful sort; that is, one that will have all events grouped in order and grouped under their associated controls)
at any rate, upon exporting this table, and doing the above sort using excel, i find that IS had been duplicating values in the "ordering" column. this might not be a problem if i could simply edit the file in excel, then re-import it, but that functionality doesn't exists either.
so the only way to sort everything properly is to use the direct editor, and manually reassign the sequence numbers. this is kindof painful since i can't generate a useful sort with the simple grid control.
since there are duplicated Ordering values, and these values are generated by the IDE, i would call that a bug,
call these feature requests: i think the direct editor should be able to support cutting and pasting tab-delimited values (so that external tools can be used to make up for the shortcomings of the direct editor)
i think the direct editor, when sorting by a particular column, should start the sort with the list sorted as displayed. this would allow for prioritized searches as described above.
The same problem occurs with IS 2010. It is quite annoying indeed, as we have to correct it manually, either in the direct editor as you mentioned, or directly in the ISM file.
