Snippet Compiler vs. Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition

Coding with Snippet Compiler

While looking for a lightweight C# Editor to refresh my C# knowledge, I stumbled across the tool Snippet Compiler written by Jeff Key. The tool needs less than 2 MB of hard disk space besides the installation of the dotnet framework. Installing is easy: just copy the files in a directory.

The Development Environment of Snippet Compiler

The editor itself is very nice. It resembles the visual studio editor, with a very limited intellisense function but without the overhead of a whole project structure. So it’s great for the quick writing or testing of code snippets. Of course there is not built-in C# documentation so you have to use the documentation of the .NET framework.All in all it’s a very nice tool and definitely better than using notepad and csc.exe!

Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition

So I started looking for C# Snippets to refresh my C# Knowledge. I checked the german site http://www.dotnet-snippets.de/. There you can look for different code snippets via tag keywords. So I randomly selected one code snippet (ReadFromClipboard), copied and pasted it and after adding the right using directive it worked! Great, my first step in becoming a really good C# Developer…While examining the site a bit more I noticed the announcement of a Snippet Contest which ends on December 15th. The best code snippet will win a Windows Vista Ultimate Version. What a boost to my motivation! So I will try to submit an own code snippet in December.An important hint on the site was the proposal of the editor which should be used: Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition. As it is provided by Microsoft for free, I downloaded the software. With 50 MB to download and 100 MB space on the hard disk it is definitely larger than the snippet compiler. But it is worth the space!

The Development Environment of Visual Studio Express 2005

As a bloody beginner I don’t notice the differences to the full version of Visual Studio, so I am really happy about it. At that point when I discover the limitations of the express version I certainly will already be at least an advanced C# developer. So this version is great for me at the moment.Besides: I also downloaded MS SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. I guess I will need it later for sure!