Visual Studio 2010 opened to the plugins world. The new Extension Manager (matchless in benefits to the
The new Extension Manager of Visual Studio 2010 allows browsing and downloading easily an immense amount of plugins.
Visual Studio 2010 opened to the plugins world. The new Extension Manager (matchless in benefits to the add-in Manager of Visual Studio 2008) allows browsing and downloading easily an immense amount of plugins.
We consider that, thinking of performance, we should not turn into using many extensions. Below we will recommend ten free and useful plugins for Visual Studio, leaving out the classical plugins or commercial multi-tools such as Resharper, Devexpress Coderush and Visual Asist X.
- Documentation: GhostDoc. A widely used extension, documents in XML format, in semi automatic way, facilitating and simplifying this task.
- Improvements in the IDE: VSCommands 2010 provides code navigation and generation improvements which will make your coding tasks faster, together with essentials IDE enhancements, it will take your productivity to another level.
These other extensions had been developed by the Visual Studio team and they are also really useful:
- PowerCommands is very light. Adds different funtionalities/ contextual menus, saving time and clicks such as open a Command prompt or the containing folder where one of the files from the solution is located (through a contextual menu) and “Format document on save” that performs the command of “format document” automatically. It has a smart copied of classes and references and, among many others, my favorite command: undo close
- Productivity Power Tools: incorporates a series of new functions in Visual Studio such as: improved search, many improvements in the navigation and visualization of the code, adds a better “solution explorer” called Solution Navigator and has lots of changes (several are very useful) in the tabs/navigation of documents.
- Code Versioning with SVN: it’s true that we are used to the Visual Studio-Team Foundation Server couple for the versioning of the code, but clearly SVN also is an option and AnkhSVN CollabNET is a fine free tool.
- Useless but fun: the Visual Studio Color Theme Editor will not improve any technical aspect, but it allows using predefined graphic themes, changing the whole aspect of visual studio.
- Tools for the IDE: we know that sometimes the creation of regular expressions can be an unpleasant job. This tool lets you to perform them in an integrated way in the IDE, simplifying its creation.
- Code Comparison: although the beyondcompare is superior, the codecompare is free and tends to be better than the IDEs default tool.
- The power of examples: Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: a code library that provides examples for typical development tasks. Strongly recommended (also has content for VS 2008).
- Uses of TFS: for those that use TFS beyond its functionality standard, the TFS power tools 2010 it is already a classic.
Do you have some plugin you would like to recommend?
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