Essential Visual Studio add-ins and other tools

Summary: Improve your programming experience with Visual Studio add-ins and other enhancements.

If you are a Windows programmer using Visual Studio, here are a few thing which can enhance your programming experience.

Visual Studio add-ins

• Code Convert converts source code between C# and Visual Basic.NET.


• CodeRush Xpress for C# includes hand-picked features taken from CodeRush and Refactor! Pro add-ins.


• CopySourceAsHtml allows you to copy source code, syntax highlighting, and line numbers as HTML.


• GhostDoc automatically generates XML documentation comments for methods and properties based on their type, parameters, name, and other contextual information.


• NArrange automatically organizes code members and elements within .NET classes.


• SelectionTree adds feature selection tree dialog to appropriate setup and deployment (MSI) projects.


• Spell Checker supports text verification in HTML style comments, ASP.NET server side comments, JScript, C# and C++ comments, CSS and C, VB and VBScript style comments, as well as in JS, CS, VB, CSS, CPP and H files (requires Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Microsoft Word 2003 or 2007).


• StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules.


• Versioning Controlled Build automates versioning of .NET and VC++ projects (handy for multi-project solutions).

Code snippets

• Visual Studio 2008 Code Snippet Library (C#)


• Visual Studio 2005 Code Snippets (C#, Visual Basic.NET)

Hacks

• How to Automatically Stop a Visual Studio Build on an Error: will save you time when the build of dependent assemblies fails (it makes no sense to continue with the solution build when one of the project builds fails).