Visual Studio comes up with loads of stuff making everyday life of a developer easy. But there are few extensions which Microsoft and other developers have created and are available for free to the community members. I have compiled a list of free and powerful extensions which will take your programming experience few more steps ahead with Visual Studio.
You should have a very good reason if you are not using this or if you are not aware what NuGet is. NuGet 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.
Visual Studio Achievement Extension
Get noticed, earn achievements while you write code. An awesome extension from Microsoft for programmers to get them in light while they right code. Bring on the game to the code!!
A powerfull extension from Microsoft with tons of features to make your work a lot easier. A MUST HAVE for every developer.
VSCommands provides code navigation and generation improvements which will make your everyday coding tasks blazing fast and, together with tens of essential IDE enhancements, it will take your productivity to another level.
PowerCommands For Visual Studio 2010
PowerCommands 10.0 is a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2010 adding additional functionality to various areas of the IDE.
You must have witnessed most of the features provided by this extension in VS 2011 Developer Preview. For Visual Studio 2010, you can make use of these features with this extensions.
This extension provides outlining and matching braces highlighting features for Visual Studio JavaScript and CSS editor. Works both in JS/CSS files and HTML script/style blocks. Outlining is like in C# editor. It outlines {}s, []s and #region tags.
Microsoft has now introduced feature in Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview, it is a color picker stuff in the CSS window for the ease of the developers so they don’t have to remember the color codes. But for Visual Studio 2010 developers this is an excellent extension that gives you a similar flexibilty.
CSSCop - FxCop for Stylesheets
We use FxCop to follow beat coding practices, but we neglect when we work with CSS. CSSCop makes it easy to adhere to best practices for writing stylesheets. It catches common errors that affect browser compatibility and much more. You can think of it as FxCop for stylesheets.
If you are analysing your code using FxCop, then get the FxCop extension for Visual Studio. FxCop is also available if you are using VS 11 Developer Preview.
Adds a right-click menu to any folder and image in Solution Explorer that let’s you automatically optimize all PNG, GIF and JPEG files in that folder. The optimization doesn’t affect the quality of the images, but optimizes them using industry proven algorithms for removing EXIF and other metadata.
Code Compare is a powerful file and folder comparison tool that demonstrates new level of code comparison.
The next time you comment on your code or someone else code, be sure that you are using the correct spellings. Plain text files, source code comments and strings and thing that are not HTML/ASP tags are spell checked.
A great extension which will automatically generates XML documentation comments for methods and properties based on their type, parameters, name and other contectual information.
Creating bookmarks in Visual Studio and then remembering them is a tough task when you have thousands lines of code. Numbered Bookmarks allows users to create and recall bookmarks by using numbers. User can create 10 bookmarks (starting from 0 to 9). User can add or navigate to the particular bookmark by using the same shortcut key.
The Snippet Designer is an open source plugin which enhances the Visual Studio IDE to allow a richer and more productive code snippet experience.
For the moment, this is it, but I will update the list once I get to know more excellent extensions. Are you aware of any other extensions you think is really cool and excellent, then please do share with me/us.