Have you ever been dissatisfied with the code that is automatically generated by Visual Studio in response to various commands that you perform. For example, in VS2005, I got used to using the prop snippet to create properties. This snippet created a property declaration complete with a private backing variable. However, in VS2008, the prop snippet was modified to create a property declaration in the form of the automatic property declaration. That, to me, was annoying.
(Note to Microsoft: Please consider the existing snippets to be part of what you consider when looking at backwards compatibility. Create more snippets, sure. But please don’t change what the current snippets do…especially when the ‘better’ snippets are not actually better)
Or, consider the fact that, as more and more work is done in WPF, the need to ensure that business classes implement INotifyPropertyChanged grows. Adding or modifying a snippet to include the code to call PropertyChanged could be quite useful. It certainly has been for me.
Little known by most developers is the location for the snippets that Visual Studio provides. Or, what might be more interesting to intrepid developers, the snippets used by Visual Studio refactoring. All of these are found in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC#\Snippets\1033. The keyword snippets can be found in the Visual C# subdirectory, while the refactoring snippets can be found in the Refactoring subdirectory. Take a look at what’s there and you may be surprised how you can increase your productivity for mundane (and frequent) tasks.