Snippets

Tuesday, December 6, 2005

Code snippets are a great productivity feature in Visual Studio 2005 (or a mind rot – depends on your perspective). Michael Palermo even has a site dedicated to code snippets: GotCodeSnippets.com.

Code snippets are easy to author. I became tired of typing in the same keystrokes to start a unit test, and wrote a snippet myself. Now I type tm+TAB+TAB, and voilà, the following code appears. A savings of 20 keystrokes:

        [Test]

        public 
        void Test()

            {

            }

The word Test is highlighted in green as a replacement – I can type over the word with a new method name. All of this is setup by dropping the a .snippet file into My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets. Here are the contents:

        <xml
        version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

                        <CodeSnippets
                        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">

               <CodeSnippet
            Format="1.0.0">

                  <Header>

                     <Title>Test Method<Title>

                                 <Shortcut>tm<Shortcut>

                             <Description>Code snippet for a unit test<Description>

                                         <Author>scott@OdeToCode.com<Author>

                                                     <SnippetTypes>

                                                            <SnippetType>Expansion<SnippetType>

                                                                        <SnippetType>SurroundsWith<SnippetType>

                                                                                 <SnippetTypes>

                                                                                  <Header>

                                                                                      <Snippet>      

                                                                                             <Declarations>

                                                                                                    <Literal>

                                                                                                               <ID>nameID>

                                                                                                                           <ToolTip>Method name<ToolTip>

                                                                                                                                           <Default>Test<Default>

                                                                                                                                                    <Literal>

                                                                                                                                                         <Declarations>

                                                                                                                                                             <Code Language="csharp">   

                                                                                                                                                                    public void $name$()

                                                                                                                                                                   {

                                                                                                                                                                      $selected$

                                                                                                                                                                   }

                                                                                                                                                                   ]]

                                                                                                                                                                             <Code>

                                                                                                                                                                              <Snippet>

                                                                                                                                                                               <CodeSnippet>

                                                                                                                                                                                <CodeSnippets>

It looks like a lot of work, but if you copy an existing snippet it’s almost too easy.

Snippets are better in VB.NET. A code snippet in VB.NET can add Imports for required namespaces to the source file, and reference any required assemblies when it expands. C# cannot. Perhaps this explains why there are over 350 VB.NET code snippets installed by Visual Studio, and only 50 for C#. It would be great to write a TestFixture snippet for C# that automatically added a using NUnit.Framework, and added a project reference to the NUnit assembly. Perhaps in the next version…

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OdeToCode by K. Scott Allen