VS 2008 Snippet Designer

Categories: VS 2008 Posted by yeejie on 7/6/2009 8:00 PM | Comments (0)

<Pasted from http://blogs.msdn.com/knom/archive/2008/10/09/a-must-have-tool-vs-2008-snippet-designer.aspx>

Mathew Manela from the Online Tools Group at Microsoft has written a really cool tool, which adds a feature missing for a long time in Visual Studio: Code Snippet Creation.

The tool, which is available at http://www.codeplex.com/SnippetDesigner allows a bunch of functionality for working with custom snippets.

  1. Add a new .SNIPPET file via File-New-File–Code Snippet File
  2. Export existing code into a snippet:
    Simply right click on the selected code and press "Export as Snippet".
    image_3
  3. Edit snippets (set placeholders, etc..)
    The editor is opened after exporting something.
    Additionally you can later on open .snippet files out of the "Snippet Explorer" (see below).
    image-9-thumb
  4. The Snippet Explorer
    Go to "View - Other Windows - Snippet Explorer" to search for existing snippets.
    image_8

The snippets you build are stored under the path %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets.

You can either insert them via the context menu "Insert Code Snippet"
(Ctrl+K-X) or you can assign a short-phrase (shortcut).

With the shortcut you just need to type e.g. prop<tab><tab> to insert a property code snippet.

You can set the shortcut (and other things as well) in the property window of the snippet editor.

Big thanks to knom’s developer corner!