Visual Studio® 2010 and .NET 4, Six-in-one

Chapter 3. Visual Studio Code Snippets

When you develop applications, you spend a huge amount of time typing source code. Even if there are many designers and wizards in Visual Studio generating code skeletons, resource information, and many code related files, at the end of the day, each developer writes code. Sometimes, typing is very tedious. For example, let's assume you have the Name property defined with the following pattern in C#:

private string _Name;

public string Name
{
  get { return _Name; }
  set
  {
    _Name = value;
    PropertyChanged("Name", value);
  }
}

It almost could be written with the automatic property syntax of C# (this syntax was introduced in C# 3.0), but, unfortunately, you have a PropertyChanged call in the property setter requiring a backing field and manually created getter-setter definitions. If you have other properties such as Title, Description, Active, and so on, following the same pattern as Name, you must type the previous pattern in addition to a lot of replacing for the occurrences of Name and _Name with the appropriate identifiers.

The work of Visual Basic programmers becomes even dustier, because they must type a bit more, as shown here:

Private _Name As String
Public Property Name() As String
  Get
    Return _Name
  End Get

Set(ByVal value As String)
    _Name = value
    PropertyChanged("Name", value)
  End Set
End Property

What if you could create a lot of properties with these semantics by only typing their names? Well, you can if you use code snippets!

Early versions of ...