ActiveSnippets - Imagine Visual Studio 2005 snippets, but with the full power of CodeSmith available to execute any logic or access any complex metadata (including database schema and xml data) to control the output of your snippets.
Configuring an ActiveSnippet is easy and can be done from within Visual Studio! You can configure which arguments you want to expose to your ActiveSnippets.
For example, if you have 5 properties in your template, but 3 of them are optional, you can include only 2 of the required properties that you would like to expose to the alias here. While the other 3 would be on the left side, and use the default values you would specify on the 3rd tab.