What are your recommended extensions for Visual Studio 2010? (Please indicate if its free or not And also its purpose / function too)
This question is related to
visual-studio
visual-studio-2010
The answer is
tangible T4 Editor plus modeling tools for VS2010 adds IntelliSense and Syntax Coloring to T4 Text Templates (Free)
VisualSVN (not-free)
I personally prefer this over AnkhSVN since its not an SCC provider and doesn't add extra files to my repository.
DevExpress CodeRush Xpress (free)
Code Contracts Editor Extensions, a free extension which provides information about inherited contracts for the method you're currently working on, and a list of contracts for any methods that you're calling. Unfortunately, the latter feature conflicts with Resharper, but the former still works fine.
VisualHG is a Mercurial Source control plugin that drives TortoiseHG from VS. I'm a big fan of Mercurial & DVCS. VisualHG makes it nice n integrated. Git fans - I'm not asking for a flame war. Hg is just my brand.
NuGet (formerly NuPack) is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development.
Mouse Zoom (Free)
Zoom at the mouse's cursor instead of at the top of the visible document. Always scroll 25% no matter what zoom level is currently set.
Ctrl + Mouse Wheel -> zoom in/out at mouse cursor. Ctrl + Shift + Mouse Wheel -> zoom in/out all the way (pausing at 100 percent). Ctrl + Middle Mouse Click -> zoom to 100 percent.
Visual Studio Gallery Home
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/6de43ab2-e65c-40b3-9986-b0351c28ce53
What about the HelpViewerKeywordIndex... helps (a bit) with what is as I see it 2010's greatest flaw, the new help viewer.
DevExpress CodeRush/Refactor! Pro (not free, $249.99)
It's way better than Resharper (which by the way always slowed down my VS to a crawl), it works with C# and VB.NET (including refactoring) and the support and community is excellent. Worth the price tag. And yes, it does support 2010 (in RC at the time of this writing).
The “Quick Add Reference” extension augments the smart tag that VS shows for unrecognized types giving you a chance to add the corresponding assembly reference for that type plus corresponding “using” clause if needed in a single shot.
CleanProject - Cleans Visual Studio Solutions
How many times have you wanted to send a project to a friend or upload it to a web site like MSDN Code Gallery only to find that your zip file has lots of stuff that you don't need to send in it making the file larger than it needs to be.
bin folder obj folder TestResults folder Resharper folders And then if you forget about removing Source Control bindings whoever gets your project will be prompted about that. As someone who does this process a great deal I decided to share with you my code for cleaning a project.
AnkhSVN (free)
Even if you use other SVN shells outside VS (like TortoiseSVN), I recommend to install this Source Control Provider to automatically keep track of file renames, deletions and the like.
VS10x Code Map That is very cool. Easy jumping to property, method. And easy expand collapse region and more.
Bundles the following extensions for the Visual Studio 2010 JScript editor
Brace Matching
Adds support for automatically highlighting the matching opening or closing brace to the one currently at the cursor. Supports matching parenthesis: (), square brackets: [], and curly braces: {}. Braces in strings, comments and regular expression literals are ignored.
Outlining / Cold-folding
Adds support for automatically creating outlining regions for JScript blocks. Blocks are detected via opening and closing curly braces. Braces in strings, comments and regular expression literals are ignored.
Current Word Highlighting
Adds support for highlighting all instances of the word currently at the cursor.
IntelliSense Doc-Comments Support
Adds support for the element in JScript IntelliSense doc-comments to allow display of new lines in IntelliSense tooltips.
CodeMaid seems to be pretty useful - it AutoFormats on save which saves a lot of time between developers and code-diffs. (Are there other tools that can use the VS AutoFormat document?)
Quick Open File for Visual Studio 2010 - free. Simulates the feature known to Eclipse users as Open Resource. This plugin gives Visual Studio equivalently quick method for opening any solution file.
VS10x Editor View Enhancer - free beta. Type and member definitions emphasizing, end-of-block details, clickable hotspots (C# and VB documents)
I can't live without DPack - especially when working on large projects, makes navigating between files and members much easier. And it's free.
Favorite shortucts:
Alt+U : file browser, filters files as you type
Alt+G : code browser, filters all members as you type
Alt+M : code browser, filters methods in the current file as you type
...and so on. Much easier for me then finding my way around Project Explorer.
PowerCommands (free)
VSCommands is simply one of the best FREE plugins ot there! (visual studio gallery link)
World of VS Default Browser Switcher for easily switching browser in web projects.
AtomineerUtils Pro (not free, $9.99 USD) is, in my opinion, better than Ghost Doc. But, just like Ghost Doc or any automatic documentation generator, the generated documentation is meant to be edited to be of any real value.
This is my list of extensions.
The list on this is pretty comprehensive, so I spent sometime to find the extensions that I need. Here is the snapshot. Hope it will help someone.
I tried installing Codemaid, and it appeared to be a nifty addon, but my Visual Studio response became very slow. Felt like some threads were doing some work all the time when Codemaid was on. So uninstalling for now.
Visual Assist X(not free)
ReSharper (not-free)
CppLister is free tool for C++ developers. It just collects information about currently open file from intellisense database and displays various information for easy navigation.
Align by - Obviously I'm bias since I wrote it but it's the extension I use more than any other.
Visual Studio Color Theme Editor (free)
I can't code unless my VS2010 has a StackOverflow-like theme.
From my blog post (all free):
- Word Wrap with Auto-Indent
- Indentation Matcher Extension
- Structure Adornment
- This also installs the following extensions:
- BlockTagger
- BlockTaggerImpl
- SettingsStore
- SettingsStoreImpl
- This also installs the following extensions:
- Source Outliner
- Triple Click
- ItalicComments
- Go To Definition
- Spell Checker
- Remove and Sort Using
- Format Document
- Open Folder in Windows Explorer
- Find Results Highlighter
- Regular Expressions Margin
- VSCommands
- HelpViewerKeywordIndex
- StyleCop
- Visual Studio Color Theme Editor
- PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010
- Extension Analyzer
- CodeCompare
- Team Founder Server Power Tools
- VS10x Selection Popup
- Color Picker Completion
- Numbered Bookmarks
Plugin to quickly go to any file in solution Sonic file finder (free)
Fast switching between .h and .cpp file Macro available here (free)
And that's it =)
Vingy 1.0 is simple, but effective add in for Visual Studio 2010 so that you can search the web in a non intrusive way, and can filter results based on sources.
You can bring up Vingy either by clicking View->Other Windows –> Vingy Search Window from the Visual Studio IDE, or just by high lighting some text in the document and then clicking Tools –> Search Selected Text (Ctrl + 1).
Searching with Vingy is pretty straight forward. You can initiate a Search in two ways.
- By typing the text in the Vingy search box and pressing ‘Enter’ or by clicking the ‘Go’ button
- By highlighting some text in the editor when you type in Visual Studio, and then pressing Ctrl + 1
HQLAddin - for NHibernate HQL editor.
Ghost Doc (Free)
It takes a while to configure it properly, but it can be quite useful.
VSFileNav - (Free) A Find File in Solution tool (cross between SonicFileFinder and Resharper). Lightweight, easy to use and fast (I got sick of the huge startup time with Sonic).
Disclaimer : I wrote this tool.
devColor (Free)
Small tool which underlines hex colors in stylesheets with the correct color. I really like how it integrates into the editor.
RockScroll (free) - Double-click on a word/symbol highlights all occurrences of that word/symbol. Also replaces the scroll bar with a preview of your code, with edit spots and "all occurences" lines highlighted.
Example of use: want to see whether a variable is used anywhere else in current source file? Double-click variable, look at scroll bar for any red highlights.
Source: Stackoverflow.com