Windows Developer Power Tools

6.4 Creating Standalone Snippets with Snippet Compiler

So you need to quickly write and compile a couple of lines of code to prove an assertion of your’s to a colleague. You’ve bet a grande soy light chai caramel mocha latte on your assertion and you’re thirsty now. You need a quick way to prove your point and win your just rewards. Firing up an instance of Visual Studio and fooling around with creating a new project is just going to take too long. What to do? Notepad2 is quick, but it doesn’t give you any way to build or run the test code you’ll need to win your bet. Never fear; Snippet Compiler will help you win the day and score your latte.

Jeff Key, author of a huge number of highly useful utilities, created Snippet Compiler to fill just this need. Snippet Compiler is a lightweight environment for building tiny .NET apps. It supports generating Windows Forms or Console applications and even has support for templates and add-ins. Snippet Compiler supports C#, Visual Basic, and JScript.NET.

Snippet Compiler at a Glance
Tool	Snippet Compiler
Version covered	2.0.8.3
Home page	http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/SnippetCompiler/
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/66
Summary	A nifty tool for quickly checking snippets without firing up a full-fledged IDE. Sits in the System Tray until you need it.
License type	Freeware
Online resources	Author’s blog
Supported Frameworks	.NET 1.1, 2.0
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