Productivity tips: live templates in Visual Studio and ReSharper

In my blog post Two readability tips for naming and organizing tests, I shared some tips for arranging tests. The tests are typically named and organized like this:

[Test]
public void ItemUnderTest_Scenario_ExpectedBehaviour()
{
  // Arrange
  Arrange the test here...

  // Act
  Do the action which is being tested here...

  // Assert
  Do assertions here...
}

While the naming and arrangement scheme is simple enough, it quickly becomes boring to write this stub every time you write a new test. If you are fortunate enough to use Visual Studio with the ReSharper plug-in, however, there is a nice feature called "live templates" which can do it for you!

Live templates allow you to type a keyword, select one of the live template entries from the popup menu which automatically pops up, and ReSharper will automatically insert the template for you. In this case, the template for a test is named "test":

After the template is pasted into the test class, there is no need to navigate the cursor around in order to edit the details in the test name. Red rectangles represent the fields that you will typically want to edit (ItemUnderTest, Scenario and ExpectedBehaviour). Enter the contents of those fields, press enter after editing each field, and then you're ready to implement the test!

Create and edit the live templates in ReSharper->Templates Explorer. As you can see, there are already many useful built-in templates:

Notice how you define the fields that the user typically edit after inserting the template: $ItemUnderTest$, $Scenario$ and $ExpectedBehaviour$. After the user has entered the contents of those fields, the cursor is placed at the optional $END$ keyword.