Adding CodeRush Templates

Today I’m going to briefly describe one of the cool and slightly more advanced features of CodeRush in a little more detail. But first, a bit of background. One of the many things I found enjoyable about CodeRush is the templated shortcuts, ala VS code snippets but better. I found myself typing “tne-space” a lot for generating:

throw new Exception("");

with my caret placed in the quotes within the exception. However, I would dutifully go back and modify “Exception” so that I wasn’t throwing a generic exception and arousing the ire of best-practices-adherents everywhere. That rained on my parade a bit, as I found the time savings not to be optimized.

I decided that I’d create specific templates for the exceptions that I commonly used, and I am going to document that process here in case anyone may find it helpful. This is a very simple template addition and probably a good foray into creating your own CodeRush templates.

The first thing to do is fire up Visual Studio and launch the CodeRush options, which, in the spirit of CodeRush, can be short-cutted by using Ctrl-Alt-Shift-O. From here, you can select “Editor” from the main menu and then select “Templates.” This will bring up the templates sub-screen:

From here, you can either search for “tne” or navigate to “Program Blocks -> Flow -> tne”:

Now, you will be prompted for a name. Call it “tnioe” for “throw new InvalidOperationException(“”);” (You can call it whatever you prefer to type in.) Next, in the “Expansion” frame, change “Exception” to “InvalidOperationException” and click “Apply.”

Now, when you exit the options window and type “tnioe-space” in the editor, you will see your new template.

As a bonus, I’m going to describe something that I encountered and was driving me nuts before I figured out how to fix it. CodeRush’s options screen remembers where you last were in its navigation tree for the next time you launch it. However, it is possible somehow to lose the actual view of the main tree and get stuck in whatever sub-options page you were in without being able to get back.

To fix this, go to DevExpress->about and click on the “Settings” button. This will open a folder on your drive containing settings XML files. Close the options window in Visual Studio and then open OptionsDialog.xml. Set the Option with name attribute “SplitOpen” to “True” and you’ll have your normal, sane options back.