Tuesday, January 17, 2012

List of my favourite Visual Studio 2010 Extensions

There is no question that Visual  Studio is my favourite, the most used and best code editor. Now I am using Visual Studio 2010 waiting for the final release of VSTS 2011. When we use VSTS 2010 sometime we feel that, it would be nice if it has one more feature which may increase our productivity. If you start feeling like that don't wait to open the Visual Studio Extension Manager.It will look as below and it is the place where you can get the desired features as extensions which are not delivered with VS 2010 where most of them are developed by third parties.
Select the Online gallery and search for the words which match your interest.I am sure that you will find almost what you need. Just select and install from Extension Manager itself. When I used it I could see that it saved lot of time especially the spell check extension :-) .Below are some extensions I am using .Hope any .Net developer can use those to leverage his productivity.

  • Productivity Power Tools - This brings you a new Tool window called Solution Navigator which is a much improved version of Solution Explorer.Using the Solution Navigator you can drill down till the method name and open the method directly. Also it comes with a good search mechanism and much more.
  • Spell Checker - This works like the office spell check and will surely help you to write method names without spelling mistake.
  • Indent Guides - Draws a line vertically to connect your braces.
  • Regex Editor - A handy utility to test regex patterns before checking in your code.
  • TFS Power Tools - If you are using Visual Studio TFS as code repository.
NB: If you just google for visual studio 2010 extensions you will get tons of VS extension lists like this. But use it, only if you think your system is capable enough to handle the extensions. Otherwise it will decrease your productivity.

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