{
Several years ago, in a land of Visual Studio 2005 and no CodeRush, I made a tool called Proper to automate the monotony of creating properties. You just type something like “int Foo;string Bar;” and you’d get basic property generation. You can use shortcuts to types by typing an undercore “_” character. For example, “i_” will pop up int, “dt_” would pop up DateTime (You can also create your own). It’s funny how the stuff that you’re half serious about can last so long – at the time I wanted to write something useful entirely in JavaScript and to experiment a little with JQuery.
The tool suffered neglect for the next few years until recently when I began working with Silverlight and was amazed at how a similar monotony (and more code!) accompanies using INotifyPropertyChanged and implementing dependency properties. I remembered my old tool and added support for generating them there. Here are some screenshots that should illustrate how it works (you select “advanced options” and then select a few checkboxes, in a nutshell). I’ll update the feature to report bugs – I’m sure there are a few. I also neglected to update it for VB.NET – I’ll do that over the next few weeks.
If you do spot a bug, let me know. There are a few new goals I have with the tool, the first of which is refactoring some of the embarrassing JavaScript I crufted together to make this work. I remember Kevin Dangoor talking about Embarrassment Driven Development (when your code is so embarrassing that you’re motivated to update it); that’s the one thing about JavaScript – you can’t hide the way things are constructed. :)
Posts
