Top Visual Studio 2015 Extensions I Use
Rich IDEs are a great asset to enhance productivity in writing and reading code.
Visual Studio 2015 as a rich IDE helps a lot when navigating through code and files, refactoring, smart searching classes/methods/properties and much more. But still there are some useful or improved functionalities not baked in, that can be easily found as extensions.
Here is the list of extensions that I use every day:
- Refactoring Essentials - Rich free refactoring tool for C#.
- Add New File - The fastest and easiest way to add new files to any project.
- Easy Motion - A vim EasyMotion clone for Visual Studio. Instead of moving your hands to the arrow keys or even worse, grabbing the mouse, simple initiate an easy motion search by pressing
Shift + Control + ;. (NOTE: I changed my shortcut to be bound toCtrl + Shift + Fas I can trigger it only using the left hand.) - Indent Guides - Adds vertical lines at each indent level. It can even add a vertical line to a certain character length (e.g. on 100 characters length so you know visually how long is your line of code).
- Configuration Transform - Automatically transform web.config, app.config or any other config during the build process. Once the transformation is set, it will run on other build machines without the extension.
- Hide Main Menu - Automatically hides the Visual Studio main menu when not in use. To show when hidden, press
ALTkey. - Rename Visual Studio Window Title - This lightweight extension allows changing the window title of Visual Studio to include a folder tree with a configurable distance from the solution/project file. (NOTE: The title template I use is:
[solutionName] ([configurationName]) - [documentParentPath:2:0]) - Open Command Line - Opens a command line at the root of the project by pressing
ALT + Space. Useful when you need to execute commands from CMD at the current project's directory. - ResXManager - Manage localization of all ResX-Based resources in one place. Shows all resources of a solution and lets you edit the strings and their localizations in a well-arranged data grid.
NOTE: I do evaluate performance hit on Visual Studio itself before I use or recommend an extension. There are some other good extensions too that I don't use because they slow down Visual Studio a lot. Fast and responsive IDE has higher priority than new or improved functionalities on my machine :)
What extensions do you use, dear reader?