Most developers I've met and talked to throughout my career have shared one thing in common: their interest in solving problems and their disdain of the mundane. Boring, repetitive tasks are the bane of the development world, so much so that oftentimes programmers will spend countless hours constructing a solution that relieves them from some mundane chore, even if the time it takes to build a workaround is longer than the time that the boring task would require!

A common "bore chore" in development is hammering out similar code, a task good IDEs will eliminate. For example, when using Visual Basic in Visual Studio .NET, typing out:

Will automatically expand into:

Public Property PropertyName As Type
  Get
  
  End Get
  Set (ByVal Value as Type)
  
  End Set
End Property

Unfortunately C# doesn't provide such automatic expansion. Furthermore, there are more specific scenarios that you may need to implement that Visual Studio .NET does not handle by default. Fortunately Visual Studio .NET provides a way to create your own expansions, in a round-a-bout way: through the use of macros. Macros are short pieces of code you can write that interact with the Visual Studio .NET environment. In this article we'll look at how to create macros to eliminate repetitive typing for a task common to custom ASP.NET control developers - creating property statements that use the ViewStateStateBag as a backing store. Read on to learn more!
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