Pimp my Visual Studio (2008)
Here’s my list of addins an customizations to Visual Studio 2008 that I currently use:
Addins
- Jetbrains Resharper 4.1 – Description should be unnecessary.
- dotTrace 3.1 – Performance/Memory profiling – works well together will R#
- PowerCommands for VS2008 – A couple of nifty commands; especially copy/paste assembly references between projects. (I believe the former name for this addin was CoolCommands).
- Visual Studio Properties Window Search/Find plugin – Adds a textbox to the property grid, that enables you to quickly filter and find a specific property in the list. To install this one, you need to change the 8.0 in the .Addin file to 9.0, and all the files from the archive into the Addins subfolder of My Documents\Visual Studio 2008 (Create one if it’s not present).
- Clone Detective – Just installed this one. The reports says that it actually quite good at detecting “cut’n’pasted” code section, and helps you identify what you can factor out.
- Lexware Assembly Reference Tool for Visual Studio – Great addin for sorting out / cleaning up assembly references. (Before I found this tool, in multi-solution scenarioes I had to open the project files and change the bin\Debug or bin\Release part of the references with bin\$(Configuration) by hand.
- AnkhSVN – Adds Subversion Source Control Management features to Visual Studio. Open source / free.
Color themes and fonts
- Theme: Ragnarok Blue
- Theme: Faculty of the mind
- Font: Envy Code R
- Font: Lucida Console 14pt
- Font: Consolas
Templates and snippets
I have some custom WCF related project & solution templates as well as a couple of snippets that I will polish & publish later.
Shortcuts that I can’t live without
- ctrl+. or shift-alt-F10: multi purpose; typically infer usings of types.
- alt-enter: R# Swiss army knife shortcut
- [ctrl-k, ctrl-c] and [ctrl-k, ctrl-u]: Comment/uncomment section.
- [ctrl-m, ctrl-m], [ctrl-m, ctrl-l] and [ctrl-m, ctrl-o] Collapse/Expand sections.
- shift-alt-Enter: Full screen – code is king!
So, I’m really interested to hear what other people uses and if there are some obvious things missing from my list.
I’m tagging the following persons and ask about their opinions:
Comments
Pingback from Anders Norås’ Blog : My Souped Up Visual Studio
Time October 14, 2008 at 8:05 pm
[...] Wilhelmsen just wrote up a list of the stuff he’s got going in his tricked out Visual Studio 2008 installation. He tagged me, so here is the lowdown of what I’m rolling [...]
Pingback from Anders Norås’ Blog : My Souped Up Visual Studio
Time October 14, 2008 at 8:05 pm
[...] Wilhelmsen just wrote up a list of the stuff he’s got going in his tricked out Visual Studio 2008 installation. He tagged me, so here is the lowdown of what I’m rolling [...]
Pingback from What tools I use when developing software – Fohjin.com
Time October 25, 2008 at 1:40 pm
[...] with a question what kind of tools I use when developing software. Well looking at his post and at Lars Wilhelmsen, who started this series, post I am not so much a tools kind of guy I guess 
[...]
Pingback from Jukka-Pekka Keisala » Blog Archive » Customize VS.NET 2008
Time November 15, 2008 at 4:01 am
[...] out more at Lars Wilhelmsen post Pimp my Visual Studio (2008) also this and this post is worth of checking out if you are intrested to see different apps that [...]
Pingback from Anders Norås’ Blog : My Souped Up Visual Studio
Time October 14, 2008 at 8:05 pm
[...] Wilhelmsen just wrote up a list of the stuff he’s got going in his tricked out Visual Studio 2008 installation. He tagged me, so here is the lowdown of what I’m rolling [...]