@ Head : Snippets

Updates on the Snippet Editor

bill — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:03:56 GMT

First the good news :

The February release of the Snippet Editor has now had 10,000 downloads !

Now for bug fix news:

There were a couple of issues with the paths per language. A problem with Express Editions of Visual Studio occurred due to partial entries in the registry I didn’t for-see. Initial design and testing was done with full versions of Visual Studio, but I want to ensure that it does work with the express versions, that’s why the tool is standalone not an add-in. So the good news is I have fixed those bugs (I think).

If you want those fixes you can use the original source from Feb and just download the updated products.vb file. I’ll probably look at rolling this up into a new release in the not to distant future.

Enjoy :)

Screen-cast recording tools

bill — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:56:10 GMT

Recently I got this email from Ted:

Hi Bill!

Love the snippet tool, it's great!

I'm curious, what tool did you use to produce the screencast for the tool? The quality is awesome!

Thanks a lot!

Kind regards,

Ted

The answer to that is I used Camtasia Studio 5. It’s really easy to use and lots of options on output formats. And it will even produce the basic html file for you with the embedded video etc.

Note: I really like Camtasia. I do also get it for free from the nice folks at TechSmith as they value the contribution MVPs make to the community, and that makes it even easier to like :)

An alternative worth looking at is Expression Encoder 3 Screen Capture which comes with Microsoft Expression 3. I’ve only given it a quick test drive and it seemed pretty good. Picking formats was a little daunting, but I got it to produce some good quality wmv files that were really good for the bandwidth (small file size). I haven’t driven it enough to find how to produce web files that embed the video; my guess is it would be more silverlight orientated. Still if you have a MSDN subscription that includes expression, it’s definitely worth a look at.

Snippet Editor 2.1 screen-cast

bill — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:08:31 GMT

I’ve just uploaded a new screen cast:

Snippet Editor Tips and Tricks

Enjoy :)

(oh and don’t forget the “buy me a beer” button)

New release of Snippet Editor

bill — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:31:38 GMT

Snippet Editor 2.1 is now released on codeplex:
http://www.codeplex.com/SnippetEditor

Apart from the few minor bug fixes, it includes improved search and now support for Visual Studio 2010 as well as 2008 and 2005.

I’ve also added a “buy me a beer” button to this blog, and on the codeplex site, so if you like the Snippet Editor you can help put a smile on my face :)

The snippet editor remains free: no advertisements, no nag screens.

yep, free as in beer ;)

Enjoy :)

XSD’s in Visual Studio: Past, Present and Future.

bill — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 02:51:36 GMT

When I was going through the snippet editor code to put it on CodePlex, I wanted to grab a screen shot of the snippet schema. immediately I was confronted with there being no visual designer for schemas in VS 2008, but the worse part was I could have sworn there use to be. To clear up that confusion here’s an illustrated history lesson on schema views in Visual Studio.

In earlier versions of Visual Studio the schema designer was a bit like the early dataset designer.

This is Visual Studio 2005 :

It was detailed as far as types and constraints goes but omitted documentation. With complex schemas it was a mess, but you could hide parts.

Then in Visual Studio 2008 they decided to get rid of the schema designer completely !! I’m really not sure the logic on that. There was however a CTP for the new Schema Explorer, and come Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, the schema explorer was included. (I hope I’ve got that bit of history right)

The Schema explorer gives a nice overview, and provides for navigation but totally lacks real details (not synchronized with the properties window). Sadly for Visual Studio 2008 that’s as best as it gets, the rest is wading through the actual xsd file as xml.

The first CTP of Visual Studio 10, reveals a new designer that can be used in conjunction with the Schema Explorer.

This pretty visual representation is all done in WPF so you can zoom in and out nicely. As well as the ability to easily expand and shrink elements, it’s really nice way to get an overview. You can even turn on documentation so as you can see any comments from the schema:

Although this is very pretty, and a great visual aid, it still doesn’t provide any means to create a schema or edit one… it’s simply a view. Some things I’d like to see improved are :

Provide designer editing and creation of schemas
have an export to .png feature
Ability to fully expand comments for all items. At present only the first two lines are shown and you have to double click on each element to get the comments to fully expand
did I mention editing ?
tear-offs would be nice, such that I could then use the width of the screen (eg: Drag the “Header” element from the above picture to the right, and then it expands over there rather than in situ.)
show restrictions. For example, the SnippetType is restricted to three possible legal values, “Expansion”, “SurroundsWith” and “Refactoring”. To find that out I have to delve into the xsd.
Synchronise with Properties window allowing for more detail to be shown and edited in the Properties window
Provide Copy as Path. The bottom of the screen shows the path of the selected node, but it would be great if you could select to copy that to the clipboard as an XPath. Even cooler if you could choose between XPath, VB XML Axis/Literal sytnax, or XElement syntax (for those poor ol’ C# folks ;) )

The Visual Studio 10 stuff looks promising, but still has a long way to go. (did I mention the lack of editing ?) In the interim it would be nice if there was something, anything ! I’m really not sure why the 2005 xsd designer was dropped. Sure some of it was ugly, especially the way it shows things like the string restrictions, but it was and is less ugly than the XML for that part of the xsd !!

Visually we have progressed... but what about the editing ??

Snippet Editor is now on CodePlex

bill — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 09:13:22 GMT

I’ve just finished uploading the Snippet Editor to CodePlex

http://www.codeplex.com/SnippetEditor

It includes some minor bug fixes from the previous release.

Enjoy :)

And Merry XMas :)

VB Snippet Editor

bill — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:42:02 GMT

Over the last week I’ve got a sudden influx of emails about the Snippet Editor. I’m figuring this is stemming from Lisa’s recent blog entry and her tips and trips for VS 2008 presentation :)

Some of the emails have been really nice praise, folks wanting to add some features, a bug on XP 64 (which unfortunately is about the only OS I don’t have in my testing suite), and some general questions around snippets. So I gave this lots of thought and decided to put up a site on CodePlex. This will allow people to add features, work together on bugs, and share discussions around snippets including future directions for the snippet editor.

The new codeplex site will be at http://www.codeplex.com/SnippetEditor

It’s not ready yet, and will probably be a week while I get all the bits together and ensure there’s no rude words in the code comments etc ;) I was hesitant about moving to CodePlex as I was really disappointed how gotdotnet was just closed down and not migrated. And I should add here a word of caution for those in charge should CodePlex go a similar route.. I will travel the continents and track you down and when I find you stare at you for a really long time until you feel uncomfortable !! ;) (Seriously, please don’t close codeplex)

So, all going well, the Snippet Editor will be on CodePlex this time next week. I’ll make sure to post when it’s ready and redirect my current site there. Any suggestions on the open source license eula etc most welcome.

Text preview filters for Vista|Windows 2008

bill — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:41:20 GMT

I really like the preview pane in explorer in Vista, but it doesn’t have previews for a lot of text based files registered. You can of course write your own or download and install some other preview filters, but personally I find a text preview is all I generally need. So I re-use the existing Text preview handler and apply it to a range of file types including batch files, .bat, xml, .reg files, .vb and .cs files etc. Just copy and run the following .reg file

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.xml\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.reg\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cmd\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.bat\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.VBS\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.vb\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.vbproj\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cs\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.csproj\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.sln\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.snippet\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

What ever happened to easter eggs ?

bill — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 02:36:36 GMT

No, not the chocolate ones or the decorated chicken eggs... I mean software easter eggs. Like the ones in Excel where you could display an animated scroll of all the contributors. And they had similar in Outlook, and even in Visual Studio 6 ! Has all the fun (and chocolate and caramel centres) been taken out of Microsoft software ?

BTW: Has anyone seen the easter egg in the VB Snippet Editor ? It's pretty easy to find ;)

Too much information or the philosophy of "less is more" ....

bill — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:29:48 GMT

On Monday night I was walking along the streets in Melbourne heading out to give a presentation on VB 2008. while waiting for some pedestrian lights I noticed this guy standing outside St George's bank with signs all over him. He had newspaper clippings, and what looked like stories scribbled over backboards plastered to himself. In the 90 seconds or so that anyone would be waiting it was too much information to get his message across. Instead of getting a message across to people, he frankly looked more like a loon ;) I'm not sure what his actual message was, but I imagine it would be about loans or similar. So he should have focused on that. Perhaps one big slogan, "St George heartless to customers" or "St George at the heart of sub-prime".

Anyway, it resonated with me when I saw this guy failing to get his message across as I headed out to give a presentation myself ;) The good news is from the accounts I heard, my brief presentation went well. I loved hearing folks say that it convinced them to use VB in 2008 :) And all within a 20 minute presentation !!

But here, I've probably rambled too much, because the message I wanted to get across to people isn't about any of the above, other than the "less is more" concept. What I wanted to talk about was Code Snippets and that you should go through what is there, modify them, remove them; get a list that you are comfortable with. I was just watching Brian Beckman And Beth, and saw that together they couldn't find the snippet for adding an operator overload. They were close at one point; they just had to scroll. Unfortunately VB comes with so many it's hard to know them all, and time consuming to wade through them looking for one.

Some things you can do are:

try guessing the shortcut. For example, for operators if you guess "op" for starters and type in op? and press tab, you'd find the operator overloading snippets. Likewise for property, if you type prop? and press tab you'll find the shortcuts for most property snippets.
Create your own folder for snippets, and organize your favourite snippets in there. This is pretty easy to do with the snippet editor, and you can just drag and drop the snippets around

Long term, I'd like to see snippets propagated into the normal intellisense, and concepts like most frequently and most recently used worked into the snippet shortcut menus as well as the snippet hierarchical views.

If you have some spare time over the holiday season do spend some of it looking at snippets, templates and customising the IDE. Streamline your experience for you. Just as a woodsman sharpens his axe before he fells a tree, you should take that time to sharpen your IDE experience. Don't be left fumbling around trying to find a snippet :)

Inserting snippets in VB.

bill — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:28:00 GMT

Sara Ford writes about inserting snippets in VB and C#. Unfortunately, Sara hasn't got it quite right. In VB 2008 the statement completion window does NOT show snippet shortcuts. It only shows namespaces, types, members and keywords. It just happens that many of VB's keywords are also snippet shortcuts.

In VB 2005 you could type the shortcut and press tab. In VB 2008 however the code completion window gets first preference, so if you type the shortcut and press tab, and that shortcut happens to be the first part of any name in the code completion window (namespace, type, member or keyword), then you will not get your snippet instead you'll get the match from the code completion window. You've got a couple of choices to actually get your snippet inserted. You can press Esc then the tab. That will close the code completion window, then your snippet is the only match. The other way is to type the shortcut or part there-of followed by a ? This will bring up the snippet shortcut list.

e.g type app?

Snippet paths and duplicates in VS 2008

bill — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:07:17 GMT

If you install VS 2008 on a machine that has VS 2005 on it, you'll be prompted to let VS 2008 import as many of your settings from 2005 as possible. Generally this is a good thing, but you might run into some issues with code snippets as you might have both the 2005 and 2008 collections loaded in VS 2008.

The problem is Visual Studio stores snippets by default in the %InstallRoot%, which for VS 2005 is Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8 and for VS 2008 it's Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0. But when Visual Studio migrates your settings from 2005 to 2008, it just copies the registry value which include %InstallRoot% in the paths as a replacement variable. So what this means is if you modified the snippets by hand or using some other tool, your new snippets will NOT include the ones you previously modified.

If on the other hand you used the snippet editor in 2005, it saves the paths as the full path, so in VS 2008 you'll have both the 2005 paths and the 2008 paths. This also is not ideal. You can quickly remove the root folders you don't want by right clicking on them and selecting remove. (Note: root level folders are the folders stored in the registry and have a blue asterisk on them in the snippet editor)

In either scenario you are still faced with maintaining multiple collections of snippets by default. The best thing you can do is to create a folder in your user do documents folder, and then move sub folders and snippets to that path. This makes it easy to share snippets between versions of Visual Studio. You'll need to open the collections to remove the paths that are in the %InstallRoot%, but once done you have a centralized common folder tree for your snippets.

In fact, I like the idea of doing that so much, I think I will add a wizard to the Snippet Editor that does this for you. This would also let you have your snippets where you don't need administer rights to modify them.

There's also a couple of other minor changes I plan to make later this week, such as surfacing the collection selection onto the folder pane.

Oh, and if you are using the Snippet Editor as is with VS 2008 alongside VS 2005, you might be seeing duplicates for snippets in Visual Studio but not in the Snippet Editor. This is yet another one of the undocumented "quirks" about how Visual Studio deals with snippets. If you look in the languages\CodeExpansions key registry you'll probably see some values stored under "Basic" and others under "Visual Basic". This is a "temporary" state. If you run Visual Studio's Snippet Manager and click on the OK, it will remove the "Basic" key and put all the values under the "Visual Basic" key, at which point the Snippet Editor and VS's Snippet Manager will all be showing the same collection. When I wrote the Snippet Editor, once the "Visual Basic" key was established in the registry, it meant that the collection was already initialised. If it wasn't there then I'd initialise it for you. Same kind of thing with "CSharp" and "Visual C#". But now with 2008 that pattern has changed, as in both keys can be there.

Unfortunately little of this if any is documented, so it means my code has to be reactionary rather than pro-active: That is, I have to fix it when they do things that break it ;)

Update on Snippet Editor

bill — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:45:20 GMT

I've finally given the Snippet Editor a major make over including a new look.

To go with this, I've given it a new home on my web site:
http://billmccarthy.com/Projects/Snippet_Editor

And I've added a Snippets category to this blog for feedback, info etc. I'll update the web page with new releases if/when they occur including a change history.

Enjoy :)

P.S. I'd love to get feedback on the new UI, especially the "About" screen ;)