Question

In Visual Studio when you insert a snippet and finish inserting literals the cursor jumps to the beginning of the snippet.

Now I’d like to tell visual studio where the cursor should go afterwards. I’ve searched the web and actually hold little hope for this to be possible.

To illustrate, suppose I have this snippet:

<Code Language="csharp" Kind="method body" Delimiter="$"><![CDATA[this.SyncThreadRunInvoke(() =>
            {

            });]]>
    </Code>

Then after inserting:

this.SyncThreadRunInvoke(() =>
            {
            []<- I want the cursor here
            });

Answer 1

Use the $end$ variable as shown in the following “if” snippet for c#.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<CodeSnippets  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
    <CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0">
        <Header>
            <Title>if</Title>
            <Shortcut>if</Shortcut>
            <Description>Code snippet for if statement</Description>
            <Author>Microsoft Corporation</Author>
            <SnippetTypes>
                <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType>
                <SnippetType>SurroundsWith</SnippetType>
            </SnippetTypes>
        </Header>
        <Snippet>
            <Declarations>
                <Literal>
                    <ID>expression</ID>
                    <ToolTip>Expression to evaluate</ToolTip>
                    <Default>true</Default>
                </Literal>
            </Declarations>
            <Code Language="csharp"><![CDATA[if ($expression$)
    {
        $selected$ $end$
    }]]>
            </Code>
        </Snippet>
    </CodeSnippet>
</CodeSnippets>