For those of you working with Visual Studio 2005, you’ve no doubt discovered the awesome power of Code Snippets, as well as the ability to design your own Code Snippet templates. Unfortunately, for those of us developing in C#, Microsoft kind of forgot about us when they decided to create a code snippet editor tool.
After a bit of Googling, I came across Snippy, a tool for generating Code Snippets for C# developers. So far, I’ve used it for some fairly simple templates, and it seems to work pretty well. The documentation was a little less-than-useful however, and I ended up loading Microsoft’s code snippet files as examples to see how to build my own template.
The UI is basically laid out as the XML tags would be generated, but it is definitely a time-saver over writing straight XML – once you do get past the 5 – 10 minute learning curve.
MSDN Magazine wrote an article for their April 2006 issue. It talks about the wonderful power of Code Snippets, but is extremely biased toward Visual Basic developers (they even designate a third of the article to the detailed use of the Code Snippet Editor for VB.NET that I mentioned above).
I think they did devote two or three sentences to C# developers though, so now I feel loved…Â