Have you ever been in an organization where how the code looks is more important that what the code actually does? Seems weird eh? But there are some organizations who are like that IMHO.
Code beautification.........isn't that something the IDE/editor should do for you? Why should highly skilled and highly paid developers spend time formatting their code, ordering methods in a certain way, putting property definitions before overridden methods, etc? Seems a bit weird to spend any amount of time organizing code when you have a perfectly good slave (the computer and editor) to do that heavy lifting for you! If you can trust your editor, then you can concentrate on just making the code do what you want, not on how good it looks.
That's the job of the automatic formatting capabilities of the editor IMHO! You should just have to go Format Document and BOOM! It adheres to any and all software development and corporate standards? Or even better yet, if you use PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008, you can automagically format your code on every save. Therefore your code will ALWAYS adhere to corporate standards and you didn't have to lift a finger! COOL EH?!
Ok, so what's a coder to do when he's trying to order properties, constructors, variables, methods, etc? You could buy an expensive tool to do that for you. Or you could use Visual Studio's templates. We've all used these before, most notably when you're adding a new class.
If you select the Class item, you'll get the following code.
Notice three things.
- You didn't have to add in the namespace text.
- The name of the class is automagically named for you (it would be the samething you typed out on the Name field above).
- The class is NOT public!
Today at work, I found out a great suggestion from our architect (SG). The suggested order for blocks of code should be (I love that, quite ironic, when it's jammed down your throat, it's natural to resist, when someone suggests it and let's you think about it, you're MUCH more inclined to agree to it! :>):
As you can see, there is a specific ordering to the blocks/regions of code. Now I could have added a new class and typed all this out by hand, but what fun is that, especially when it's so easy creating your own template to do all that heavy lifting for you?! The you can get back to concentrating on coding your next sprint task!
To do this, you create your own template, install it and BINGO, you're done! Simple! Well, there are a few gotchas along the way, but we'll cover them!
Template File Structure
The Visual Studio template structure is simply a zip file placed in the following path.
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\Code\1033
There are a few other's in there, like project templates for example.
The internal template structure is rather simple, check it out.
The only unfortunate thing about editing these files is, since they're in a zipped format, you cannot edit them in-place (well, if you find a way to do it, bonus, tell me about it!). So what I usually do, is copy out one of the existing template contents (as a starting point), customize it, create my zip file, copy it into the right directory and then install the templates (this requires a special step).
As an aside, take a look at the directory names under the ItemTemplates directory. Don't they match up nicely to the Categories? Funny how that works out so nicely eh? :>
Creating the Zip file
I usually start by finding a good starting template, one that's close to what I want, then customize that. So in our case, we can use the Class template located in:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\Code\1033\Class.zip
I would open up that zip file, copy it's contents (not the zip file but it's contents) to a temp directory of some type (I usualy use C:\Temp). This way you can easily zip up the file, copy it back here and install it.
After you've copied the .cs and *vstemplate files to your working location, rename them to something a bit more appropriate, making sure to keep the extension intact, but you knew that already, right?! :> Then open them up in Notepad, or anything else. You could use Visual Studio, but the templation is to expect Visual Studio to understand those files, but they don't (at least not yet, not in VS08, hopefully in VS10 they'll have a native editor available). There is a boat load of things you can do with VS templates, so you should read the MSDN article about them, but my guess is if you're here, you're already pretty familiar with what's in the files and can make sense of what you see pretty easily. Likewise with the .vstemplate file with the following tidbits of info:
- <Name> is the english name (ie can have spaces) you will see in the Template pane of Visual Studio.
- <Description> is what appears right above the Name field and below the Categories and Templates panel, this gives your use a bit of a heads up on what the template is supposed to do.
- <Icon> is great to help identify your custom tempates quickly, you'll want to use .ico here, make sure the ico file lives in the zip file too.
- <DefaultName> is what the Name textfield will default to.
Once you make your changes, zip up the file[, rename it], then copy it to the same place as listed above where the Class.zip file came from.
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\Code\1033\
Template Installation
Next you have to install the templates. It would be great if Visual Studio could just "watch" certain directories for changes and install them itself, but it's just not that smart. You have to tell VS to install the templates with the following command:
devenv /installvstemplates
But again, it would be too easy to just open up a command prompt, type that out and you're done, right? Yup, too easy. The easiest thing to do is goto your Start menu, find your Visual Studio install and find the command prompt there. Why? Cause it has paths setup properly for you to issue the devenv command. With Vista and User Access Control (UAC) turned on, you'll have to run the VS command prompt as an administrator (as illustrated). With XP, you should be fine just running the VS command prompt.
Once you have a command prompt, run the devenv /installvstemplates command, wait a minute or two (hopefully not longer than that) and BINGO, your new customized template is installed! If you get a bunch of text flying by telling you about the proper argument use for devenv, don't worry, you probably just typed out the arguments wrong, try it again. You'll know you got it right if you're waiting for 30 seconds to a few minutes and the command prompt comes back with no errors.
Now What? Using Your New Found POWER! :>
Now that you have your new custom template installed, what's next? You use it of course! :> Open up a solution or project, add a new item, find your template and select it.
Then check out the string substitutions made for you and you're ready to focus on coding again.
I hope you've enjoyed this talk about Visual Studio templates, creating, installing and using them.
References:
Visual Sutio Templates (MSDN)
How to Get Visual Studio to Create New Classes Public by Default