C# in Depth

30 CHAPTER 1 The changing face of C# development1.4.2 Introducing SnippyJust knowing what the code would look like isn’t terribly helpful, so I’ve written a smalltool that you can download from the book’s website. It’s written in WPF, so you’ll needto have .NET 3.0 or higher installed in order to run it. Figure 1.6 shows a screenshot ofit in action.It’s not a visual masterpiece, but it does the job. You can edit the code, compile it,and run it. There are different options available to use different using directives andreferences depending on which part of the book you are looking at, although thechoice of “.NET 3.5” will compile anything that doesn’t require extra custom references.Snippy doesn’t try to work out which using directives are actually required by thecode, so the full code is rather longer than the examples in the previous section, buthaving extra using directives is harmless.Aside from the WPF requirement to run Snippy, everything in the C# 2 section ofthe book compiles and runs with only .NET 2.0 installed, and all the snippets compileand run with .NET 3.5 installed. There’s a single button to compile and run, as you’reunlikely to want to do anything after a successful compilation other than runningthe code.As I mentioned earlier, not all examples work this way—the examples in this chapter,for instance, all require the Product type, which isn’t included in every snippet. Fromthis point on, however, I will give fair warning whenever a listing isn’t a snippet—sounless you hear otherwise, you should be able to type it in and play around with it.Of course, if you don’t like manually typing in code from books, you can downloadall of the code from the book’s website, including extra examples that don’tappear directly in the text. All the code works in the Express editions of VisualC# 2005 and 2008, although of course the examples that are specific to C# 3 don’trun in Visual C# 2005. 8Figure 1.6 Snippy in action.The code in the top area isconverted into a full program,then run. Its output is shownin the bottom area.8Some of them may run in Visual Studio 2005 with the C# 3 extension Community Technology Preview (CTP)installed, but I make no guarantees. The language has changed in a few ways since the final CTP was released,and I haven’t tested any of the code in this environment. Visual C# 2008 Express is free, though, so why notgive it a try?Licensed to Rhona Hadida