Matt Manela's Blog : Snippet Designer

Snippet Designer in April’s MSDN Magazine!

MattManela — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:33:47 GMT

I am excited to announce that the Snippet Designer is featured in the April issue of MSDN Magazine.

It is featured in the Toolbox column where they highlight useful tools and blogs. Here is a snippet of what it says:

Creating Code Snippets is a lot easier when using Snippet Designer (version 1.1), a free, open-source Add-In for Visual Studio 2008 for creating and editing Code Snippets directly within the IDE. Once you install it, creating a new Code Snippet is as easy as going to the File menu and creating a new Code Snippet File.

That is so cool! If you are interested go and download the Snippet Designer from the Codeplex website and give me more feedback.

Also, in the same article my friend Sara Ford had her blog featured. When I found out the Snippet Designer and Sara’s blog were in the magazine I quickly emailed to ask Sara if she knew about it. She already did and also had an extra copy of the magazine for me!

Snippet Designer 1.1 Released

MattManela — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:11:28 GMT

I just released Snippet Designer 1.1. This is not a major release but just some bug fixes and often requested changes to make the snippet designer more useful.

Some of the most notable changes are:

Languages Service are turned OFF by default now. Since I was unable to figure out a way to host the C# and VB language services in the snippet editor without causing fake errors in projects I decided to give the users an option to turn them on or off. If you are ok with the fake error you can turn this back on but since it really annoyed me I have it off. I plan in a future release to provide some basic color coding outside of the language service so you can at least have color coded code.
Many more aspects of the plug in are now configurable through the options menu under Snippet Designer. you can now set the location of the snippet index, set preferences for which snippet languages you would like to appear in the snippet explorer.
Several bug fixes to how the highlighting of replacements works and performance improvements with it also.

Hopefully these changes will make it much more useful so please download it and try it out here.

The future…

My plans for the future are still up in the air but some of the things I would like to add are:

More bug fixes and more feature enhancements suggested by many helpful users on the Snippet Designer Codeplex page.
Ability to color code snippets without using the language service. I have a few options here I have been looking at.
Create a website to host snippets and allow you to consume and publish from Visual Studio to this website.

I don’t know how much time I will have to commit to any of these but hopefully I will be able to get more work done on this.

Thanks!

The Snippet Designer is Released!!!!

MattManela — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 08:06:59 GMT

Some History

The Snippet Designer was started as an intern project of mine during the Summer of 2006. The idea was to make snippet files (which were introduced to Visual Studio in 2005) a first class entity. Following this idea I created a Visual Studio plug-in which included an editor for snippet files and a search tool window to find snippets. The plan then was to release it on Codeplex but when my internship ended the project was forgotten about.

Today

Now after two year of sitting there I found the code, cleaned it up a bit and am releasing it on Codeplex as an open source project at http://www.codeplex.com/SnippetDesigner. My goal in releasing it on Codeplex is two fold. First I would like people to try it out, give me feedback and see if we can make it better (it still has plenty of rough edges). Second I would love to turn this into a community developed project where we all can collaborate on it.

Features

The Snippet Designer has two main features:

A Snippet Editor hosted in the IDE which lets you edit the code, make replacements and change snippet properties:

A Snippet Explorer which lets you search for Snippet files on your computer an quickly open and edit them.

In addition to these two features the plug-in adds a context menu item inside of the VB, C# and XML editor that lets you export any highlighted code into the snippet editor:

Getting Started

After installing the Snippet Designer you are ready to create and edit snippets. Either open up any .snippet file or in Visual Studio go to View -> Other Windows -> Snippet Explorer and use the Snippet Explorer to search for snippets.

I look forward to any and all feedback!