Visual Studio Hacks

Make Pasting into Visual Studio Easier #7

Chapter 2, Master the Editor

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HACK

HACK

#7

Make Pasting into Visual Studio Easier Hack #7

Don’t be limited to plain text. You can paste strings into Visual Studio as

comments, string, StringBuilders, and more.

SmartPaster is a plug-in for Visual Studio .NET 2003 that allows text on the

clipboard to be pasted in a format compatible with C# and Visual Basic

code. SmartPaster can be downloaded from http://www.papadimoulis.com/

alex/SmartPaster1.1.zip. After downloading and installing SmartPaster, you

will see a new item on the right-click (context) menu, which is shown in

Figure 2-4.

Paste as String/StringBuilder

I find myself most frequently pasting text as a string or a StringBuilder. You

can copy any sort of text from another application, then when you paste

that text into Visual Studio, you can choose to paste it as a string or as a

StringBuilder.

Many developers like to build a SQL statement using a tool such as Query

Analyzer, for easy testing and debugging, or Microsoft Access, for quick,

visual development. As simple as it is to build queries externally, putting

them into code can often be a challenge, especially when the queries span

multiple lines. SmartPaster eases the task of bringing external queries to code:

simply copy your query to the clipboard and paste as a string or String-

Builder. For example, if you copied the following SQL to your clipboard: ...