One of the most interesting features of the Delphi 2006 editor is the introduction of Live Templates. Some of the predefined Live Templates allow you to change the way you write the code, like the Variable Injection templates that allows you to define a variable anywhere in your source code... letting the template move it to the proper var block. (I was showing it this morning, and the Delphi programmers seeing it for the first time liked it a lot).

A nice thing about Live Templates is that they are fully customizable. A not so nice think is that they are not documented. The Delphi Wiki site fills this gap woith two interesting articles, one with lots of examples and the other with some reference material. Now what I'd really like DevCo to document, beside some of the other details, is the list of scripts (or internal functions) you can invoke from the templates, like:

  • InvokeClassCompletion
  • PopulateCase
  • DeclareVariable
  • RemoveTemplate
  • ValidateForTemplate

It would also be nice to know a little more about adding your own scripts to templates, like Adam does in the demo references by this blog entry. Again, the more I look into this feature the more I like it and the more I feel it should be documented better... and I know there is very little in my "update-to-Delphi-2006" ebook, so it is my fault as well!