Visual Studio Hacks

417

Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Enhancing Visual Studio

Hacks 92–100

The hacks in this chapter focus on add-ins that enhance the overall function-

ality of Visual Studio. Previous chapters covered a lot of add-ins that help in

a particular area of Visual Studio, like navigating the IDE or writing faster

code, but in this chapter, the add-ins are more general enhancements to the

functionality of Visual Studio.

This chapter will first look at how to best manage add-ins, including how to

hack them to install for different versions of Visual Studio; how to manage

installed add-ins; and how to repair add-ins that are not working properly.

You’ll also learn about add-ins that can spellcheck your code, test regular

expressions in Visual Studio, generate better Web Services code, unit-test

applications, and more.

HACK

#92

Manage Add-ins Hack #92

Visual Studio can do a lot on its own. You can have it do so much more if you

take advantage of add-ins.

Visual Studio add-ins are an excellent way to expand on the functionality of

Visual Studio. Throughout this book, we have talked about a number of dif-

ferent add-ins and how they can be used to make the most out of Visual Stu-

dio. We have even talked about how to write add-ins

[Hack #89]. This hack

explains how to best work with add-ins. They can sometimes be trouble-

some and hard to manage.

Installing Add-ins

All add-ins should come with an installer; if they don’t, ...