VS Code PowerShell Snippets

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Just a quick post, as much as a reminder for me as anything, but also useful to those that attended my sessions last week where I talked about snippets in PowerShell ISE

Jeff Hicks wrote a post explaining how to create snippets in VS Code for PowerShell

I love using snippets so I went and converted my snippets list for ISE (available on GitHub) into the json required for VS Code (available on GitHub)

Here is an example of snippet

[code]"SMO-Server": {
        "prefix": "SMO-Server",
        "body": [
            "$$srv = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server $$Server"
        ],
        "description": "Creates a SQL Server SMO Object"
    },

I followed this process in this order

Click File –> Preferences –> User Snippets and type PowerShell or edit $env:\appdata\code\user\snippets\powershell.json

In order I converted the code in the existing snippets “Text” like this

        Replace `$ with $$
        Replace \ with \\
        Replace ” with \”
        \r for new line
        \t for tab
        Each line in “”
        , at the end of each line in the body   except the last one
        Look out for red or green squiggles 🙂
I then add
The name of the snippet, first before the : in “”
The prefix is what you type to get the snippet
The body is the code following the above Find and Replaces
The description is the description!!
and save and I have snippets in VS Code 🙂
snippets.gif
That should help you to convert existing ISE snippets into VS Code PowerShell snippets and save you time and keystrokes 🙂

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