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Code Expansions and Surround with Technology

Visual Studio 2008 (as well as Visual C# 2008 Express) has the capability to insert prefabricated

blocks of C# code using menu selections, context-sensitive mouse clicks, and/or keyboard short-

cuts. The number of available code expansions is impressive and can be broken down into two

main groups:

•

Snippets: These templates insert common code blocks at the location of the mouse cursor.

• Surround With: These templates wrap a block of selected statements within a relevant scope.

To see this functionality firsthand, assume that you wish to iterate over the incoming parame-

ters of the Main() method using a foreach construct. Rather than typing the code in by hand, you

can activate the foreach code snippet. When you have done so, the IDE will dump out a foreach

code template at the current location of the mouse cursor.

To illustrate, place the mouse cursor after the initial opening curly bracket of Main(). One way

to activate a code snippet is to right-click the mouse and activate the Insert Snippet (or Surround

With) menu option. Here, you will find a list of all code snippets of this category (press the Esc key

to dismiss the pop-up menu). As a shortcut, however, you can simply type in the name of the code

snippet, “foreach” in this case. In Figure 2-23, notice how the icon for a code snippet looks a bit like

a torn piece of paper.

C H A P T E R   2