One of our lead developers recently shared a list of some of the most helpful, free Visual Studio add-ins, and we thought you might find it useful. They are as follows (in no particular order) :
NuGet Package Manager
This is a collection of tools to automate the process of downloading, installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing packages from a VS Project. The de-facto standard for third-party package management in Visual Studio, it comes standard with Visual Studio 2010 SP1.
If you haven’t used it before, we recommend you spend some time here.
Power Commands for Visual Studio 2010
This adds a few helpful commands to Visual Studio, like Remove and Sort Usings, Collapse Projects, and Copy/Paste References.
There’s also a Visual Studio 2008 version available here.
Regionerate
Regionerate can help you keep your layout consistent with a single click. Automatically sorts your members alphabetically, and optionally groups them into separate #regions for public/protected/private methods, fields, constructors, and properties.
SlowCheetah
According to VisualStudioGallery.com, SlowCheetah is described as a package that “allows you to automatically transform your app.config (or any file) when you press F5 in Visual Studio. You can have different transformations based on the build configuration. This will enable you to easily have different app settings, connection strings, etc for Debug versus Release.” It adds the ability to perform XDT xml transformations for any xml .config file, not just web.config.
Scott Hanselman has a good primer on how to use the transformations.
VsTortoise
Free integration of TortoiseSVN with Visual Studio 2010. Adds a “VsTortoise” right click menu to Solution Explorer that acts just like TortoiseSVN does for Windows Explorer. TortoiseSVN should be installed first, before installing VsTortoise. Unfortunately, VsTortoise does not automatically pick up on Rename operations in solution explorer, but it is free. If you need a low cost solution that has full rename support, there is VisualSVN instead.
JScript Editor Extensions
From the authors of the “Power Commands” add-in comes a nice extension for JavaScript editing that adds full Intellisense XML comment support, automatic curly brace pairing, and code folding.
GhostDoc
GhostDoc adds a “Document This” context command and hotkey to the code view window, automatically populating your XML Intellisense comments based upon the name of your method/property currently under the cursor. Not always necessary, since typing a /// above the member will automatically stub the comments for you, but can still be helpful on occasion.
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