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by Jeff Key.
Original Post: Favorite VS.NET Whidbey feature of the day: Expansion
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While playing around with the new refactoring feature in VS.NET (joy!), I stumbled upon the Expansion option. Yes, my friends, this is a good day. Not only is the refactoring solid (at least on my two-file test), but the expansion is a welcome surprise. I've tried [free|share]ware tools for both in the past and they came up a little short. The refactoring tool, in particular, always crashed after a while and wound up hosing my VS.NET installation. (This happened more than once.)
Sadly, the keyboard shortcut for expansion is CTRL+ALT+M, X. Thank goodness for custom keyboard mappings. This brings me to yet another nice find: Import/Export settings. Not only can you import/export, you have granular control of what settings you import/export. Thank you!
Still excited about expansion, I wanted to see how to make my own. Tools|Options? Not there. Hm. Help file? Ah yes, a topic called “How to: Create Expansion Templates“! The entire text for this topic: “An Expansion template is an XML file.”. Let's hope the disclaimer (”This topic is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases.”) is an indication that it will change.
Anyway, I jumped into Longhorn Explorer, went to the VC# folder in the VS.NET Whidbey folder and tried to do a search for *.xml files. Either I'm an idiot, or this is impossible. I tried searching a number of different ways, and each of them brought me to the natural language search for Contacts, My Stuff, etc. Oh well. Finally sifted through the folders and found it in the ExStencil folder.
Thank goodness VS.NET Whidbey is RTMing before Longhorn. The changes in the framework are great, but the new stuff in VS.NET make it a huge win as well.
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