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

• Build Version Increment alters the default version auto-increment style (supports simple increment by 1, date stamp, etc).
• 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.
• Code Style Enforcer checks the code against a configurable code standard and best practices (Visual Studio 2010 only).
• 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.
• Productivity Power Tools offer a set of extensions to Visual Studio Professional (and above) which improves developer productivity.
• SelectionTree adds feature selection tree dialog to appropriate setup and deployment (MSI) projects.
• Regular Expression Tester Extension lets you create or modify regular expressions and test them with any text.
• 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 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).

See also:
Visual Studio Tools and Extensions (MSDN Magazine, January 2011 issue)