Sunday 20 August 2006

Visual Studio 2005 Snippets - literal dollar sign $$$

Been using Visual Studio 2005 snippets since I installed it... double-[tab] is a common keystroke now. Of course, my first attempt to create a Snippet wasn't as simple as it should be thanks to the dollar sign escaping of variables. I wanted a 'standard' VSS region-wrapper as a snippet (yes, I realise I can also add it to our class file template).
#region Page History
/*
* $History: $
*/
#endregion
but the editor interprets $History: $ as a variable and doesn't display it. Tried Google, but not easy to search for '$' and get useful results... after a few false starts trying to Xml entity encode it (ie. >) which also didn't work, I tried the double-dollar-sign $$ at random - and it worked!

Got Snippets is a great place to start when looking for useful snippets (or ideas/samples to build your own). Some of them are pretty complex.

Some other useful snippet links: