What Visual Studio plugins would you consider essential for a new(ish)/returning C# developer?

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213

answers:

+7 Q:

What Visual Studio plugins would you consider essential for a new(ish)/returning C# developer?

I've been a developer for about 20 years now, and did some C# about 5 years ago.

What Visual Studio plugins would you say I couldn't/shouldn't live without? They could help with:

Language Constructs .Net Framework Generating stub code to speed things up

Thanks!

+23 A:

JetBrains ReSharper which really enhances the IDE and helps with best practices, refactoring, etc. (It looks like DevExpress CodeRush is another alternative)

RedGate .Net Reflector to help understand the ins and outs of how things are working "behind the scenes".

GhostDoc is nice if you're using XML comments to document your code.

TestDriven.NET is great if you're doing Test Driven Development (or any kind of Unit Testing, really).

And while I haven't used it personally (but plan to try it, now that I found it), MetalScroll looks like a very helpful tool when working with large code files. It replaces the scrollbar with a scroll-able document preview.

Justin Niessner 2010-07-07 13:21:35

+10 if it were possible ;)

Martin Klinke 2010-07-07 13:22:14

Resharper is beyond essential - while you can develop without it, it makes life a whooooole lot easier when your projects become big.

ibarczewski 2010-07-07 13:41:47

The DevExpress tools are an excellent (and my preferred) alternative to ReSharper - one or the other of those is essential.

Dan Puzey 2010-07-07 14:11:08

i know this isn't a popular opinion, but if you can generate a comment based off of the method name (what ghost doc does), that comment is pure noise, and just gets in the way when reading a code file.

Matt Briggs 2010-07-07 14:28:56

@Matt Briggs - You're right. The generated comment text is noise. The point is that it generates all the boilerplate XML so that you don't have to type it all by hand. You're supposed to modify the actual documentation for your need.

Justin Niessner 2010-07-07 14:31:56

@justin: i guess its just bad experiences, where people generate comments to satisfy fx cop

Matt Briggs 2010-07-07 16:47:10

I liked everything except GhostDoc. Auto-generated comments are no more useful than the code itself, and IMO a waste of time. If you are going to comment...WRITE your comments and make them useful. Don't generate comments that simply reiterate the code itself in a different form...thats just tacky and useless.

jrista 2010-07-08 01:12:40

@jrista - Matt Briggs made the same comment. See my response.

Justin Niessner 2010-07-08 01:19:37

@Justin: I read it...however, I think the "boilerplate" argument is rather thin. With normal VS2008/2010, I simply have to type three whacks (/), and I get all the "boilerplate", like the summary, parameters, etc., generated for me. I am then free to fill in the documentation myself, and make it truly useful. My beef with GhostDoc is that, since it generates the xml elements AND the "documentation", 99% of developers leave the generated documentation, and NEVER fix it. As such, I think GhostDoc is a terrible tool that only aids in cluttering code with thousands of lines of useless comments.

jrista 2010-07-08 04:52:40

+7 A:

to make visual studio comparable to other IDEs, you really need either DevExpress CodeRush, or (my personal favorite) JetBrains ReSharper

Matt Briggs 2010-07-07 13:23:18

+1 for mentioning CodeRush.

Chris Shouts 2010-07-07 13:28:25

pretty much everything devexpress does is great (imo their asp components blow teleriks out of the water) The only reason I prefer resharper is because I have been using JetBrains tooling for most of my career, and at this point their way of doing things is pretty second nature to me.

Matt Briggs 2010-07-07 14:30:42

+3 A:

Power Commands has a lot of very useful features which make using Visual Studio a little easier.

GhostDoc is also great for generating comments in your code.

They're both free.

iobrien 2010-07-07 13:26:46

+1 for mentioning GhostDoc

Oliver 2010-07-07 14:14:22

-1 for mentioning GhostDoc, again. GhostDoc is a repetition-generator, and serves no purpose other than to make it easier for developers to generate worthless documentation that provides no meaningful insight. Documentation isn't simply something that should be filled in to get rid of a warning...it should be as meticulously crafted as the code it describes so that it actually provides value to another developer. GhostDoc documentation is simply a reiteration of the code in slightly different form, and violates the DRY principal.

jrista 2010-07-08 04:55:02

+2 A:

If you're using VS 2010 Premium or higher, check out the Code Contracts static analyzer. If you use Code Contracts assertions in your code, it will statically analyze your assertions and try to prove whether they are true.

Pex is also extremely interesting (for unit testing), though I haven't played with it enough yet to know how beneficial it will be. I did try running it on a Parse routine for one of my custom value types and its explorations discovered a number of corner cases that I hadn't considered.

Dan Bryant 2010-07-07 13:55:44

+1 for PEX. Excellent tool that has started to save me tremendous amounts of time. I highly recommend it.

jrista 2010-07-08 04:55:33

Jet Brains Resharper and Ankh SVN

Jean-Christophe Fortin 2010-07-07 14:42:31

Another suggestion: for 2010, look at this great post from Scott Hanselman: The Best Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, Power Commands and Extensions

Gabriel Mongeon 2010-07-08 01:06:50

+2 A:

The obvious resharper and reflector others have mentioned. I have a few dozen, but they're for particular tasks. Some of the more general ones I use:

Pro Power Tools

PowerCommands

VsCommands