Visual Studio ad-hoc tools and plugins

Question

Guys,

I opened this question (I hope could help some others) but reading stackoverflow I find some really interesting pearls of information lost in the cloud. What do I mean? For example I was reasearching the Web for the best way to validate parameters in methods. I was breaking my head trying to find a nice, elegant way to do it, then I found a question about Code Contracts.

Then I found that many programmers are using the new FWK 4.0 Contracts and that blew up my mind ( I didn´t even know that exist).- I was trying to reinvent the wheel again.- So there are plenty of plug ins, tools, addons, kits, frameworks, etc and not everybody are aware of all of them.

Perhaps somebody is having a headache during the design of an application and a "well known" VS add on can help you.-

So what is that little tool that you can´t stop using and makes your development much more easy.

Three that I found (Im sorry if this is too newbie)

1. NetReflector (Sweet!)http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/
2. VSDocman (For documentation, free trial) http://www.helixoft.com/vsdocman/overview.html
3. Code Contracts (for parameter validation) http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/contracts/

Thanks in advanced :D (And hope this helps)

Answer 1

I use the following plugins for Visual Studio:

• Ankhsvn for Subversion
• Resharper
• CopySourceAsHtml (useful for pasting code in emails when reviewing)

Answer 2

• Visual Assist
• for C++: IncrediBuild

Both not free, but definitely worth their price.