F# code snippet + snippet management for Visual Studio 2012 Addon

If you ever use the C# code snippet feature, you will love how it works. When you cannot memorize the syntax or some commonly used code patterns, the little snippet will be your assistance. I decide to use my weekend time to get this working. Our Shanghai team helps us provides about 70 snippets covering basic syntax, query, type provider, cloud, etc. Shanghai team will continue contribute to the public storage. The setup file is available here.

Setup steps

1. close Visual Studio 2012.
2. copy the setup zip to your local computer and unzip it
3. find your Visual Studio 2012 installation path and create folder structure like the following one:
   "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\FSharp\Snippets\1033\SnippetsIndex.xml"
   
   Note: if you are not running English version (1033), you need to find the language ID from C# folder.
4. Run the package file, which can also be found at VS Gallery.
5. after you go into visual studio, you can perform your first download.

if you decide NOT to sync up with our F# snippet hosted on cloud, skip next section.

Sync up on Cloud (Expired)
This feature is retired, please use the local installation. 

Install Locally
If you decide NOT to sync up with cloud F# snippet. You can download the snippet from the codeplex project. Those snippet files need to be under My Document. You can find the specific path from Code Snippet Manager. See the screen shot below. This post is also specified how to get the snippet to your local computer.

Add your snippet
If you have a common use snippet want to share in your department, you need setup your SQL server. The setup script is here. The SQL script will make sure the database setup is recognizable to the snippet binary running inside your Visual Studio 2012. Most likely you will log in to your private storage using "sa" login information. If that is the case, you will see another tab "Add Snippet".  Since the XML file has a language attribute, you can let the program know it is a C# or F# snippet. When you later on download it, it will be insert into different snippet folder.

Add Reference Feature

In addition to C#'s snippet feature, I enable F# snippet to add reference in the F# project. See the screenshot for adding a type provider. It add several DLL's as reference. you can use Ctrl+K,X to bring up the whole list of F# snippets. Some snippets have shortcut and they will show when you type, e.g. class. With many new features put into F# 3.0, I was hoping the code snippet feature can actually help you to write new syntax and further improve your productivity.

The old snippet management has a drawback which cannot be updated easily and is not easy to share the snippet among your colleagues. This snippet tool tries to address these problems by using both a public cloud storage and a private SQL storage.

Sync F# Snippet On Cloud
you need to shoot email to fsbugs@microsoft.com to get login information and unlock the IP address.


If you experience any bugs or need more snippet to help your daily programming work, please leave your comment, or use twitter(ttliu2000) to shoot me message, or use fsbugs@microsoft.com.

Uninstall
if you are going to uninstall it, you can go to Tools->Extension and Updates to uninstall it.

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