Question

Is there a way to write custom refactorings or code transformations for Visual Studio?

An example: I have a codebase with a billion instances of:

DbConnection conn = null;
conn = new DbConnection();
conn.Open();
...a number of statements using conn...
conn.Close();
conn = null;

I would like to transform this into:

using (DbConnection conn = GetConnection()){
   ...statements...
}

Everywhere the above pattern appears.

Edit: The above is just an example. The point is that I need to do a number of code transformations which are too complex to perform with a text-based search-replace. I wonder if I can hook into the same mechanism underlying the built-in refactorings to write my own code transformations.

Answer 1

As Marc said, this is more of a ‘replace’ thing than a refactoring. But in any case, ReSharper is an option, and if you decide to use it, you can check out this guide. Good luck!

It appears that the above link is now broken, try this one instead