Customizing Visual Studio

Question

I have been working with Visual Studio (WinForm and ASP.NET applications using mostly C#) for several months now. For the most part my IDE is set up fairly standard but I have been wondering what are some suggestions in terms of plugins/settings that you find to be the most useful?

Update: Thanks for all the great suggestions. It looks like a general consensus that I should look into 'Resharper' along with some eye-candy with themes and custom fonts.

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Themes

• Consolas Font Pack for Visual Studio 2005/2008
• Scott Hanselman's Visual Studio Themes Gallery
• Visual Studio Theme Generator

Free Tools

• PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008
• GhostDoc
• HyperAddin
• RockScroll
• CodeRush XPress
• .NET Reflector - (Not a plugin but still useful)

Paid Tools

• Resharper - Free (Open Source), $49 (Academic), $199 (Personal), $349 (Commercial)
• CodeRush with Refactor!™ Pro - $249

Answer 1

I have Resharper and SQL Prompt, both are excellent.

Answer 2

Resharper

Answer 3

You could try Resharper from JetBraing (http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/), the ultimate when it comes to code refactoring. I also use GhostDoc (http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc/) for helping me with documentation.

Answer 4

I second the vote for Resharper. It really substantially improves the quality of your code. CodeRush is also good, and more visual, either one of them is worth the money (if you can convince your employer to buy them for you :)). You would probably not want to use both at the same time, though, since there is a lot of functional overlap.

There's a cool free add-in that Scott Hanselman links to called "rockscroll", that replaces the scroll bar with a visual view of your code, I find it really helpful.

Answer 5

Master the built-in keyboard shortcuts (links to C# and VB keybinding cheatsheets can be found here)

Answer 6

I have tried CodeRush as my employer provides it however I find it too intrusive when coding. Does Resharper behave similar to CodeRush?

Answer 7

Personally I like having the ide pleasing to the eye. I think I found a link on Hanselman's blog but I switched to Consolas font slightly bigger than normal with a darker theme. Makes all the difference.

Answer 8

I agree with the customizing of the theme - it makes the environment a whole lot easier to deal with.

You can choose some of the ones from the gallery at Hanselman's site, or create one with this online generator.

Answer 9

Resharper is definitely a great tool. It has a moderate learning curve but is easy to pick up for some simple things and add mastery later. It is a good price for students and kinda expensive for the rest of us. Resharper is similar to CodeRush, but seems to have a larger following.

PowerCommands is a great set of add-ons that comes free from Microsoft. Things like "Open in Windows Explorer", "Command Prompt Here", and Copy/Paste references.

A discussion regarding add-ins is floating around here somewhere.

For straight-up customization, changing colors is fun, easy, and gives you a big bang for your buck. I prefer a slightly personalized version of Rob Conery's TextMate theme for Visual Studio. Once you get colors you like, you can just export the settings and carry them with you wherever you go.

Related to colors and themes, the Consolas font pack is pretty nifty and easy on the eye.

And like John recommends, a mastery of keyboard shortcuts will pay big dividends.

Answer 10

1. GhostDoc and HyperAddin provide automatic generation and formatting of XML comments.
2. RockScroll is really great for browsing legacy classes or just getting a visual feel for your own code.
3. Install TestDriven.NET to get Reflector in your Tools menu (or you could follow these instructions).

Answer 11

Make sure you install a custom color theme. These URLs are a good place to start looking for one:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000682.html http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudioProgrammerThemesGallery.aspx

I myself love Oren Ellenbogen's Dark Scheme. Really pleasant to the eyes. Also, make sure to replace the default font with Consolas or Inconsolata (one is Microsoft's, the other is free). They are both awesome.

Answer 12

I have tried CodeRush as my employer provides it however I find it too intrusive when coding. Does Resharper behave similar to CodeRush?

Yes, they are similar. I added this to my first response.

Answer 13

I can't coding without Resharper and GhostDoc, both are very good, i love that.