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There are plenty of different Add-Ins for Visual Studio see Visual Studio Gallery . Please share your experiences and favorites.

As motivation, here are some of my favorites:

Tools

For coffe break

  • Powder Toy [F] - build thrilling simulations yourself
  • OE-CAKE [F/C] - build fluid simulations yourself.

Your suggestions:

[F] - freeware [O] - open source [C] - commercial.

thameera
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mem64k
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  • he he was going to say the same thing myself... – Matt Feb 18 '09 at 09:04
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    just nitpicking typo: for Visual Assist it's "La Crème de la Crème" :-) nice list BTW. – Max Aug 28 '09 at 13:31
  • WiX was not included in Visual Studio 2010, I corrected that. – bitbonk Oct 19 '12 at 06:32
  • *Online GUID Generator [F] - in case you need a GUID* Or don't know how to use your IDE? http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fNr9nipDNbI/T8g_3hn51vI/AAAAAAAAAc4/l44htafIY00/s1600/GUID.jpg – ta.speot.is Feb 14 '14 at 09:51
  • BTW, [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/106340/what-is-your-favorite-visual-studio-add-insetting) post is essentially the same thing. – Jordan Parmer Dec 18 '08 at 22:10

9 Answers9

42

I'm amazed that Visual Assist has not been mentioned yet!

Johann Gerell
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7

ViEmu is my personal favorite. Emulates VI right inside of VS. :^)

Jordan Parmer
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5

Is nobody using Resharper? - Shame on you! ;-)

Seriously, you don't know what you're missing (I do, because I've yet to convince my boss to buy it, and my evaluation period has expired)

The addition of this tool to visual studio almost brings it up to the level of IntelliJ Idea for Java

belugabob
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    ReSharper is offtopic here :) Useful Add-Ins or Plug-Ins for __native__ Visual Studio developer. – Pavel Minaev Jul 29 '09 at 07:54
  • Not quite sure how Resharper doesn't qualify as an add-in or plug-in - or how using any such program can maintain the _native_ nature of Visual Studio ? Each to his own, I suppose. – belugabob Jul 29 '09 at 20:44
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    Native in the context of this question appears to mean un-managed. As in C/C++ and not C#. – sean e Apr 26 '10 at 01:48
  • ReSharper will have C++ support soon, but for what it's worth it's not totally useless with C++ projects. You can still `CTRL+T` and use its solution navigation capabilities. – ta.speot.is Feb 14 '14 at 09:49
  • @PavelMinaev ReSharper have support C++, [see here](http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/cpp.html) – odiszapc Aug 30 '14 at 07:53
3

RockScroll is awesome, but there is something more powerful: MetalScroll :)

btw... I also recommend this patch: http://code.google.com/p/metalscroll/issues/detail?id=9

noisy
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  • Thanks! I replaced RockScroll with MetalScroll after reading this answer. A number of features improvements and better stability. I would recommend anyone to do the same. – Dani van der Meer Jul 05 '10 at 13:57
2

VSFileExplorer is a nice file explorer for VS. It's also very helpful when used together with subversion/tortoiseSVN, since it displays the tortoise overlay icons within VS.

and of course

GhostDoc for generation of XML doc comments for methods, properties, classes, ...

M4N
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2
  • Visual assist X
  • P/Invoke
  • Refactor!
RvdK
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1

A minor one by me: Linkify that simplifies links in comments to dev wiki, msdn, bug tracker etc.

peterchen
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1

assist is very useful, visual lint is good but boring.

Deff
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0

My two pennies worth: TabStudio and RockScroll.

Tab Studio is uber-awesome when working on WPF / Silverlight apps, trying to keep track of any number of code behind, view-model and xaml files.

Rock scroll is great for larger files and quickly finding references.

Mark Cooper
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