Creating Code Snippets In Visual Studio 2022

Let's learn how to create code snippets in Visual Studio 2022.

Code snippet is an amazing way to reuse code using templates that produce a base code for common statements like loops and conditionals.

Visual Studio has a Code Snippet Manager where we can perform an administration of the default code snippets included by default.

Depending on the workloads installed in Visual Studio we can see different code snippets per programming language or technology.

Go to Tools -> Code Snippet Manager

To create a code snippet, we need to use a template where we will fill the general information for the code that we want to generate.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<CodeSnippets xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
    <CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0">
        <Header>
            <Title></Title>
		 <Author></Author>
            <Description></Description>
            <Shortcut></Shortcut>
        </Header>
        <Snippet>
            <Code Language="">
                <![CDATA[]]>
            </Code>
        </Snippet>
    </CodeSnippet>
</CodeSnippets>

We have the following properties:

• Title: Name or general information
• Author: Creator or author
• Description: Details about your code snippets does
• Shortcut: Shortcut to call the code snippet when you are typing

Let’s create our first code snippet using the following information,

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<CodeSnippets xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
    <CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0">
        <Header>
            <Title>If Windows condition</Title>
	    <Author>John Doe</Author>
            <Description>Conditional to now if the operative system is Windows</Description>
            <Shortcut>ifwin</Shortcut>
        </Header>
        <Snippet>
            <Code Language="CSharp">
                <![CDATA[if (OperatingSystem.IsWindows())
            		{
                		
            		}]]>
            </Code>
        </Snippet>
    </CodeSnippet>
</CodeSnippets>

The preview code snippet produces a condition to validate if the operative system is windows or not. You can type ifwin to call this piece of code and press “tab” twice to generate the code.

You need to save the XML structure as a file using the extension “.snippet”

To include this new code snippet in Visual Studio you have 2 options:

• Add: where you can add a folder including various code snippets
• Import: Add one or more code snippets to an existing folder

In this case, we will use import and the new code snippet will be added to My CodeSnippets folder. Click on "Finish"

You need to confirm the folder where you will import the code snippet and finally click on “OK” to save the changes.

Now you can use ifwin condition in any C# file to validate quickly if the application is running in windows or not.

Now you can create your own code snippets and improve your productivity coding with Visual Studio! 

For more information about code snippets go here.