My Favorite Visual Studio 2010 Plugins

I have gotten asked quite a few times why my Visual Studio looks different, or has some additional feature than another developers. There is a large community of plugins for Visual Studio (quite a few are free). I just wanted to link to two of the most popular that I send to people.

Power Tools

Download Productivity Power Tools

Great tool for so many little things. I am only going to write about my favorites (things I notice immediately on another devs box).

Search Add References

One of the best features is the ability to search through the Add Reference dialog. You can type a part of a namespace and it will show all that match. Great for finding DAC in the complete list of all Microsoft.SqlServer.* namespaces.

There are videos on Channel 9 showing some of the other features you might not find casually.

Organize Usings

If you use Stylecop, then the constant warnings about your using statements needing to be sorted gets old real fast. This is a right click on the using, and sort. Done.

Code Map v2

Download VS10x Code Map v2

Visualize source code by file

Visually seeing the functions, properties etc in your source file has some amazing speed benefits. I know you can hit the drop down at the top and find the name. But this is SO much faster. It does take up a bit of screen realestate on the left of the monitor. But with a widescreen you don’t use most of the screen with code anyway. This is a great addition.

Very cool addin and one that I find helps me so much with our code. The requirements from Stylecop to put some things in front of others just annoys the heck out of me because you can’t group things by logical part in a source file. With this addon you can find them quickly.

Named Bookmarks

I love bookmarks in my code. But it is a pain after a while to keep tabbing through them to find the right one. Now you can name the bookmark and find it quickly with the visual view on the left.