How many times have you needed to create a new property with its private field in your objects or pages? You had to copy and paste the private field and its property and change the private field name, private field data type, property name, and the property data type. The Code Snippet feature is the solution for this repetitive work. You can now insert a generic property and all you need to do is change the property and private field data types and names without the need to write the whole property and private field codes again.

So now that you know what a code snippet does, let us discover what a code snippet is. A code snippet is nothing but an XML-formatted file which has .snippet as a file extension and is registered in Visual Studio 2005 using the Snippet Code Editor. A code snippet supports replaceable values and referencing assemblies (Visual Basic.NET only). I will be showing the contents of a snippet file and how to create a new one later on in this article.

Visual Studio 2005 comes with a set of predefined code snippets. If you want to add your own code snippet, then you must use the Visual Studio 2005 Code Snippet Manager.