Which are the best free Visual Studio 2008 plugins?

Question

Hi,

I am new to Visual Studio 2008 (not 2010). What do you think are the best free Visual Studio 2008 add-ins or plugins? Is it there some LINT one?

Thanks

Answer 1

There is Visual Lint for example, but it's not free. In my very subjective opinion LINT is not very popular anymore.

Many use AnkhSVN for subversion access.

I personally like PhatStudio, because it helps me to browse through my C++ projects quickly.

There's also GhostDoc for creating documentation.

I can also recommend StyleCop for .NET projects. It comes with a set of guidelines/rules for code/documentation quality and provides style guides.

The list is pretty extensive, depends on personal preference and cannot ever be complete.

There's even a list on Wikipedia which contains un-free plugins, too.

Microsoft itself has a gallery with plugin/extensions, etc for Visual Studio which can be found here.

Answer 2

Bill Evjen's blog lists a few visual studio 2008 plug ins that range from simple and useful.

A good place to start looking would be the Visual Studio Gallery.

Answer 3

a good Spell Checker helps me out a lot (here is one for 2008, never used it though).

If you are interested in getting in to Text templeting the free version of tangible T4 Editor is pretty nice (here is the 2008 version).

Answer 4

PowerCommands is pretty nice: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=PowerCommands&ReleaseId=559

CodeRush Express helps you quite a lot, and Code Style Enforcer is nice too.

Due to linking destrictions for new users, I can't post more links than one - be sure to put http:// in front of these links:

CodeRush: devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/CodeRushX/

Code Style Enforcer + DXCore: joel.fjorden.se/static.php?page=CodeStyleEnforcer and devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/DXCore/