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Creating your own Visual Studio code snippets

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<re-published from my old blog> 

Some time back I got thinking... everytime I start reading mails in the C# discussion alias at my company or Eric Lippert's explanations of why the supposedly peculiar behaviour is in fact logical... the first thing I do is open up my very extensively used "ExperimentalConsoleApplication" solution in Visual Studio, comment out the existing main function in the console app project for future reference and start writing a new one... and it is kind of a pain to do this.. so I thought that it's time to get it automated.. so I wrote a snippet to do that for me.

Below is the code for that: -

 

<?

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><CodeSnippets xmlns="https://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet"> <CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0"> <Header> <Title>mainfn</Title> <Shortcut>mainfn</Shortcut> <Description>Code snippet for 'Main' function</Description> <Author>Alvaro Rahul Dias</Author> <SnippetTypes> <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType> <SnippetType>SurroundsWith</SnippetType> </SnippetTypes> </Header> <Snippet> <Declarations> <Literal> <ID>expression</ID> <ToolTip>Code in main method</ToolTip> <Default>Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");</Default> </Literal> </Declarations> <Code Language="csharp"><![CDATA[ public class MyClass { public static void Main() { $expression$ $selected$ $end$ } }]]> </Code> </Snippet> </CodeSnippet></CodeSnippets>

 

Most of the fields above are self explanatory. I'll explain a few important ones.
The <Shortcut> tag specifies what you need to type in VS to use this snippet.
<SnippetTypes> - where you can use this snippet, Expansion, Surround With or both.
<Code Language="csharp"> - the actual code to be inserted

Interesting thing to note is that all the variable items are marked with $ signs. The $selected$ attribute signifies where the selected code should go in case you use this code as a sorround with snippet.
The $end$ attribute signifies where the cursor should go once you're finished with the snippet.

Hope the above helps in your coding adventures.

 

Regards,

 

AlD