Reputation: 185

What Visual Studio plugins would you consider essential for a new(ish)/returning C# developer?

I've been a developer for about 20 years now, and did some C# about 5 years ago.

What Visual Studio plugins would you say I couldn't/shouldn't live without? They could help with:

Language Constructs .Net Framework Generating stub code to speed things up

Thanks!

Upvotes: 7

Answers (7)

Mark H

Reputation: 13907

The obvious resharper and reflector others have mentioned. I have a few dozen, but they're for particular tasks. Some of the more general ones I use:

IronPython & IronRuby Console (requires PowerConsole)

Upvotes: 3

Gabriel Mongeon

Reputation: 7351

Another suggestion: for 2010, look at this great post from Scott Hanselman: The Best Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, Power Commands and Extensions

Upvotes: 0

Justin Niessner

Reputation: 245479

JetBrains ReSharper which really enhances the IDE and helps with best practices, refactoring, etc. (It looks like DevExpress CodeRush is another alternative)

RedGate .Net Reflector to help understand the ins and outs of how things are working "behind the scenes".

GhostDoc is nice if you're using XML comments to document your code.

TestDriven.NET is great if you're doing Test Driven Development (or any kind of Unit Testing, really).

And while I haven't used it personally (but plan to try it, now that I found it), MetalScroll looks like a very helpful tool when working with large code files. It replaces the scrollbar with a scroll-able document preview.

Upvotes: 23

Jean-Christophe Fortin

Reputation: 748

Jet Brains Resharper and Ankh SVN

Upvotes: 0

Dan Bryant

Reputation: 27515

If you're using VS 2010 Premium or higher, check out the Code Contracts static analyzer. If you use Code Contracts assertions in your code, it will statically analyze your assertions and try to prove whether they are true.

Pex is also extremely interesting (for unit testing), though I haven't played with it enough yet to know how beneficial it will be. I did try running it on a Parse routine for one of my custom value types and its explorations discovered a number of corner cases that I hadn't considered.

Upvotes: 2