Windows Developer Power Tools

8.0 Introduction

Visual Studio has many things going for it, but perhaps one of the best is its extensibility. Are you pining over a missing bit of functionality? Write an add-in to fill that void. Do you want to add some commands to a context menu enabling you to rapidly open tools from certain locations? Roll up your sleeves and make it happen.

This chapter focuses on a number of great additions for Visual Studio. Sure, other IDEs like SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop are extensible, but neither of them has anywhere near the number of creative extensions as Visual Studio. Visual Studio’s community, including lots of developers inside Microsoft, has really outdone itself with the creation of small tools that let you do everything from managing window layout to spell checking HTML and ASP.NET pages inside Visual Studio.

Tip

Microsoft didn’t provide extensibility for Visual Studio Express Editions, so you’ll need Visual Studio Standard Edition or higher to make use of the tools in this chapter.

The Tools

For adding useful shortcuts to Visual Studio

CoolCommands

Lets you add a number of handy tricks and shortcuts to your Visual Studio menus.

For getting more out of the Class and Distributed Systems Designers

PowerToy for Class and Distributed Systems Designers

Adds helpful features like panning and zooming, exporting to HTML, and much more to the new Visual Studio 2005 editions, filling in the gaps of key features that are missing.

For quickly finding files

VSFileFinder

Lets you simply type the beginning ...