Visual Studio 2010 plugin and tools

This is nothing more than a list of plugins and tools that I use with Visual Studio, so I can remember where to get them each time I flatten Windows. Most of these work with 2005 also.

• Ghostdoc - autodocuments for you.
• Sourceoutliner - your current class' members ala the classview.
• Powercommands - lots of new context menu options
• Coderush - free version with some useful extra refactor tools
• Pex - automates creating unit tests, sort of
• Snipper - the tool I wrote for editing snippets
• Slashdocs - extracts XML comments into a separate file from the source.
• JSLint compiler - runs all .js files in your project through JSLint during compilation.

And the others below are fairly standard tools:

• SQL Server Dumper
• Everything
• Metapad
• Snippet Compiler
• Reflector
• Notepad++
• JQuery API in Air
• Process Explorer
• Delicious Pipette "I made this"
• Expresso Regex Tester - free registration needed
• Winrar
• Virtual clone drive
• SpecQ - ditch calc.exe and use this, it works like notepad.

A decent tool for merges in Visual Studio 2008/2010

For diffing and merging, by far the best tool in my view is DiffMerge, a free tool by SourceGear. You can configure it to work with Visual Studio by going to Tools:Options:Source Control:VSTFS:Configure User tools.

From there, add these options for merge:

• Extension: .*
• Operation: Merge
• Command: C:\Program Files\SourceGear\DiffMerge\DiffMerge.exe
• Argument: /m /r=%4 /t1=%7 /t2=%9 /t3=%6 /c=%9 %2 %3 %1

and these options for compare:

• Extension: .*
• Operation: Compare
• Command: C:\Program Files\SourceGear\DiffMerge\DiffMerge.exe
• Argument: /t1=%6 /t2=%7 %1 %2

Snippets

Here's a few snippets I use a lot, in zipped format. Stick them in your C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets folder

Snippets.zip

• aa : Assert.AreEqual(o,o);
• cr : Console.Readline()
• docctor : creates a constructor with MSDN format documentation. Made slightly redundant by Ghostdoc.
• doceq : creates Equals, ToString, GetHashCode with MSDN format documentation.
• eqsummary : creates Equals summary XML documentation in MSDN format.
• docevent : creates an Event and the raising method with MSDN format documentation.
• docgethashcode : MSDN format documentation for GetHashCode()
• doctostring : MSDN format documentation for ToString()
• propgg : getter property with a backing field
• propgs : getter/setter property with a backing field
• linq : this one is a bit stupid. I often forget the syntax of lambda select statements (I prefer fluent) so this spits out the format.
• newv : creates MyObject obj = new MyObject() where you enter the type and variable name.
• nullcheck : throws an ArgumentException if an argument is null
• snull : string.IsNullOrEmpty() snippet
• snullex : throws an ArgumentException if a string argument is null
• t3 : sticks 3 lines of comments which I sometimes use when I have to write large sections of code in 1 method, and want to delimit them without regions. This was inspired by some C source some time ago but I should probably change this to /* and */

And a dependency project snippet for Silverlight, which saves many hours of typing.

For Eclipse and Java/Android developer, here is a settings file that takes the standard Visual Studio 2010 code color scheme for your text editor, and also binds F5/F6 to debug/compile.