Visual Studio Tip: Creating Your Own Code Snippets

I recently blogged about using code snippets as a shortcut to writing more code in less time. In this post, I'm going to walk you through the steps to create custom snippets that you can install into Visual Studio for use in your own projects To get started, let's take a look at the anatomy of a snippet. A snippet is nothing more than an XML file, with a .snippet extension, containing configuration settings. If you open up the file foreach.snippet (located in "\VC#\Snippets\1033\Visual C#") you'll find the following XML, which defines the foreach snippet: As you can see, the XML used to define the snippet is fairly straight-forward. I'll go over it section by section and explain how each setting is used. Anatomy of a Code Snippet After the XML declaration element, a element acts as the root element and contains all the code snippet definitions in the file. While there can certainly be more than one snippet per file, it is usually considered good practice to only define one snippet per file. The parent element also contains a namespace definition, http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet, which is required if you want Visual Studio intellisense when designing your own code snippets. Inside the element, each snippet is defined by its own element. This element contains a Format attribute, which is used to define the version of snippet. While the version of the snippet is up to the developer, the Format attribute is required. Each element contains two inner elements,

and . The

element contains all of the snippet's details, such as title, description, author, etc. The element contains the literal, references, and code definitions. The

element contains any or all of the following elements: