Visual Studio 2010: 4 useful extensions

Just the other day for Visual Studio 2010 released two sets of official updates. The first one, Power Tools, is aimed at adding a multitude of small functional things that increase labor productivity. Second, the Modeling Feature Pack adds a host of useful features to the architectural tools of Visual Studio.

In addition to these tools, in this article I will talk about two more useful extensions of Visual Studio. By the way, the number of extensions in the online storage accessible from the Extension Manager is constantly growing and is already approaching 2000 pieces.
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Productivity Power Tools

This extension adds a lot of small things that many lacked. Some are not very important, others are extremely useful, others are available through popular extensions such as ReSharper.

Highlight the current code line

Triple-click selection to the end of the line

Moving a block

Now you can move the code block line by line up or down by selecting it and pressing Alt + up arrow (down).



after moving

Tab or spaces

Now, if, when opening a VS2010 file, it sees that your code shares tabs and spaces for indents, it will offer to select a single view and bring all the code to it.

Highlighted options

IntelliSense options are now highlighted for easy reading.

Guides

Through the context menu for the code, you can set guides.

Alignment

By calling Ctrl + Alt +] you can align the text like the one shown in the picture. Keep in mind that you first need to tick Tools-> Options-> Text Editor-> C # -> Formatting-> Spacing-> "[x] Ignore spaces in declaration statements".

Copy as HTML

Now when copying text is copied with HTML markup and can be pasted with highlighting in editors.

Multi-colored tabs

In the studio, you can now customize the colors of tabs for specific projects. A file opened from a specific project will have a tab color set for that project. In addition, it is possible to set a color condition by a regular expression.

Other tab functions

In addition to coloring the tabs, added a few more features available for configuration in the settings. The most useful, in my opinion - the tabs fastening.





Plus, there are options to remove the close buttons from each tab, add one common close button on the right (as in VS2008), change the appearance of the change indicator in the file, etc.

Navigation

Now you can jump on the definitions using Ctrl and directing it to the elements in the code. Items will be highlighted as hyperlinks.

Add Reference Dialog

The Add Reference dialog has changed significantly. Data is cached, loaded in advance, and in general it has become more convenient, clearer and faster. Indicators of already included builds are a good addition.

Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack

The second tool added is the Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack , which brings several useful features for working with architectural tools in Visual Studio 2010.

Website Visualization

C ++ Visualization (native code)

In addition, you can generate dependencies header files:



Or all dependencies at once:



The following are generated dependencies in the Windows SDK:

Code generation based on UML diagrams

This pack adds the ability to generate code based on your UML diagrams.



result:

Generating UML diagrams based on code

Now it is possible to generate chart elements based on existing code by dragging them from the Architecture Explorer panel to the diagram.

Powercommands

Another extension for Visual Studio 2010 sponsored by Microsoft. Adds a couple of dozen menu items with useful features in different places for multiple VS2010 panels. A full list of features can be found on the download page of the plugin.

Codecompare

The following extension adds to VS2010 a rich ability to compare files for changes.

Sources

• The Best Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, Power Commands and Extensions
• Announcing: VS2010 Productivity Power Tools and Modeling Feature Packs