I've been spending a fair amount of my time over the past couple of weeks digging into Windows Workflow Foundation with Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 3.0/3.5 with the assistance of Pro WF: Windows Workflow in .NET 3.5. This weekend I decided to create a virtual machine with Visual Studio 2008 and try out the new IDE. As I was building a Class in VS2008 I called upon the trusty Property snippet (aka, "prop" + tab) to generate a Property along with its backing variable. Huh? Is the snippet broken in VS2005?

Not being the brightest person, I thought there was a bug in VS2008. The resulting snippet ended up as:

public Guid InstanceId

{

    get;

    set;

}

What I expected was:

private Guid _instanceId;

public Guid InstanceId

{

    get

    {

        return _instanceId;

    }

    set

    {

        _instanceId = value;

    }

}

Is this a bug in Visual Studio 2008?

Nope. I come to find out that .NET 3.0/3.5 has gained Automatic Properties. I'm the first to admit that I do not fully comprehend an Automatic Property. However, I now have a little more knowledge in my arsenal.

How do I get my Visual Studio 2005 Property Snippet back into Visual Studio 2008?

I could re-hash what others have already done and add my own little twist on my method. Being the lazy developer I am, I'll just point you to a couple of good blog posts that'll steer you in the right direction:

• Dennis van der Stelt: Automatic properties and replacing the Visual Studio 2008 'prop' snippet
• Daniel Moth: Code snippet for property old style
• Peter Lanoie: C# "prop" shortcut in Visual Studio 2008

Enjoy!