dmandreev October 24, 2013 at 13:21

20 free add-ons for Visual Studio

A similar post was already published some time ago , since then the number of add-ons for Visual Studio 2010,2012 and 2013 has exceeded the bar in 4k, and many new additions have appeared. Listed below are the 20 most popular or interesting extensions for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 in addition to the previous post.

01: Array Visualizer

Debug time visualizer for arrays. In various views, lets take a look at what an array of data looks like. It supports dimensions up to 4 and various types of data formatting in the form of graphs - histograms, splines, lines, etc.

02: Cobisi Routing Assistant

Routing editor for ASP.NET MVC web projects. Declarative registration of routing, a routing editor and other very necessary things for developing a website structure using MVC technology

03: CodeMaid

Many utilities for working with code, including formatting, code cleaning, navigation, convolution, search, and many other useful things. For instance:

Removing Unused Scopes
Sort Scopes
Adding Implicit Access Modifiers
Adding blank lines for easy formatting
Removing blank lines between related brackets
Starting VS formatting
Delete consecutive blank lines
Remove blank spaces at the end of lines
Updating the end tag #endregion

04: Disable No Source Available Tab

Turns off the “No Source Available” window when debugging.

05: I Hate #Regions

Automatic convolution / unfolding of regions by opening a file, redone representation of regions in the editor:

06: Microsoft Code Digger

An analyzer of possible ways to execute the application for the subsequent analysis of this information. Allows you to more fully understand the behavior of the program. Indispensable in the "hunt" for hard-to-manifest bugs, exceptional situations, assertions.

07: Modern UI for WPF Templates

A set of ready-made templates for WPF. Something like bootstrap for WPF.

08: Multilingual App Toolkit

A set of tools for localizing applications.

09: PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio

Powershell editor for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013. IntelliSence, syntax coloring, formatting, code navigation, debugging (so far, as I understand it, at the level of support for breakpoints)

10: QuickLaunchCommands

Adds additional area filters to QuiclLaunch and searches for available commands in the current context.
For example, by setting QuiclLaunchCommands and focusing on the error list window, you can search for the “go to next error” command (CTRL + Q) and they will tell you that this is actually the CTRL-SHIFT-F12 key combination.

11: Review Assistant - Code Review Tool

Code Review Toolkit. There are many additional features compared to the standard features of Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, but Visual Studio 2010 is also supported.

12: Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension

The example navigator from MSDN and the Platform SDK is built right into Visual Studio:

13: SlowCheetah - XML Transforms

Transformer of all kinds of web, app, etc. config in order to convert them to the desired format or insert the desired content, depending on some conditions (debug / release / platform). For example, change connectionString for release.