Developers: ever notice how you often, when typing some piece of code, most often a variable or other class reference, have to track back your keystrokes to surround it or prefix it with something else? The Postfix Templates extension for ReSharper by Alexander Shvedov (@ControlFlow) minimizes the times you have to backtrack what you typed, by enabling you to continue typing and selecting what you actually wanted from intellitype as if it were a virtual extension method, after which the templating engine completes your code including prefixing and surrounding where needed. That may sound difficult as I describe it perhaps, but pictures paint a thousand words: check out the small demonstration videos on the github site, it explains much better than I can. Using it for a couple of days it has already saved me a lot of backspacing and cursor-left presses and it just… feels more intuitive what you are doing.

It is no secret I am a big fan of the ReSharper plug-in for Visual Studio, which really helps me during day-to-day development, writing and navigating through code and of course refactoring it. Since version 8, ReSharper comes with a plug-in/extension system that is very much like the plug-in system for Visual Studio. An extension for an extension, so to say.

Browsing through their gallery this week, I stumbled upon this plug-in. It is that kind of plug-in you didn’t know you were missing until someone came up with it. I have had it installed only for a couple of days but found it to work seamless and almost without thinking about it (which is a good thing). It comes pre-loaded with a lot of useful templates, though only for the C# language at the moment . I recommend you give it a try.