Eclipse kind of editor for Visual Studio 2008

Question

I have used Eclipse for years and when I started using VS 2008, it is good enough but misses lot of what Eclipse has or does so easily.

To mention a few, if I move my caret/cursor over an identifier, Eclipse highlights all of it's occurrences(not by string comparison but by reference mapping) in that document, we can differentiate between method & variable by colors, move to method above/below current function with Ctrl + Shift + Up/Down arrow combination.

VS misses all of these and more useful things. So just wondering if there is Eclipse kind of free editor add-in for VS 2008. Metal Scroll just does half of 1 thing (reference highlighting).

Are there any full feature add-ins?

Edit: Didn't find any. Looks like VS 2010 is way to go, or may be VS 2012!

Answer 1

This is the closest you can get for free: Productivity Power Tools. It has Ctrl+Click: Go to Definition and many more.

To differentiate between variable and method by color, you have to customize it (Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors, but this is bit tedious).

I would suggest ReSharper for more advanced features but that's not free.

Answer 2

Telerik makes a product called JustCode that provides some good Eclipse-like features. I especially like the blue/red/yellow rects that appear beside scrollbars to indicate where comments (blue), warnings (yellow) and errors (red) are. It also places a red dot in the document's tab in Visual Studiu when it has edits and does all of the field highlighting you're talking about - also does the bracket matching highlighting you'd expect in a rich IDE.

http://www.telerik.com/products/justcode.aspx

Much of what it (just-code) does interactively has been covered in VS2010 but not all of it, and it's certainly substantailly cheaper than upgrading VS2008 to 2010.

Good luck - happy coding.

B

Answer 3

You may find CodeRush and the DXCore ecosystem to be a very helpful addition to Visual Studio.