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Bill Brown

A complicated man.

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I've been tweaking ReSharper something fierce lately. I've talked about it before, but some day I'm going to write up all the things that make me love that little Visual Studio add-in. I know some suggest you should learn to love defaults, but others argue for knowing thy editor.

One of my favorite features are live templates. If you can get used to them, your productivity will soar since your hands will never leave the keyboard. I have gotten used to them and regularly create new ones when I find myself repeating.

Today I created an awesome template for doing StringBuilder.Appends. Now all I type is sb and it expands to actualStringBuilderObject.Append("MESSAGE"); with the cursor replacing the "MESSAGE" string and the enter key dropping the cursor off at the end of the line. That description doesn't do the template justice, so just make one using the screenshot below:

Screenshot of ReSharper Live Template dialog

You can get to that dialog by clicking ReSharper > Options > Live Templates and then clicking on the + icon.