Well, the latest news is that Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is available, which finally includes official support for running Visual Studio on Windows Vista [o.o], as well as for “Web Application” projects in VS2005 — which means you have to uninstall the previous web application project add-in.
While I’m writing about Visual Studio, and since I just had to reinstall Visual Studio and all my other tools on my new computer (yes, in Windows Vista), I figured I would point out some of the other add-ins that I depend on, as well as a few cool new downloads.
The Visual Studio Power Toys are a collection of addins and developer tools including ILMerge, VS Command Shell, the XML Notepad and more. In fact, MSBee — which I use regularly at work — is a one of the power toys. It allows you to develop applications that target the .NET Framework 1.1 in Visual Studio 2005. VS Window Manager is also a power toy, it allows you to save named layout presets which remember your window positions and auto-hide status… and even change automatically between layouts. There’s also a new power toy which sounds really nice, but that I haven’t had a chance to try yet: the Resource Refactoring tool which lets you extract hard-coded strings from code into resource files in C#, VB.NET and even web projects.
Anyway, the reason I started to mention the power toys is that they now have a Power Toys Pack Installer which aims to let you install some or all of these from a single installer interface. I just wish other people could publish their add-ins so they could be included in this thing — it sure would make this new setup process easier, especially if they could check for updates…
Another add-in I depend on is Roland Weigelt’s GhostDoc which makes keeping my documentation up-to-date much easier, especially because of his support for interfaces and inheritance. One pointer: if you install GhostDoc on Vista, (actually, this applies to 90% of these developer tools) make sure you run the installer as administrator or from a console with administrator access, because otherwise the installers sometimes fail, or worse, they appear to work but result in non-functioning installs.
I also use:
- TestDriven.NET which is an nUnit unit testing addin which I use at home, and actually still use at work, because we haven’t upgraded to the full Team Studio versions and testing.
- SmartPaster is for pasting string literals into code, and I find it particularly useful for pasting in SQL queries.
- CopySourceAsHTML does what it says … with lots and lots of options. Although it’s invaluable when you need it … I don’t use it as much as the others, so I tend to forget to install it until weeks later when I suddenly try to use it and it’s not there.c
- ImageVisualizer lets you see the image contained in a bitmap during debugging.
- RegexVisualizer lets you visualize and edit “Regex”, “Match” and “MatchCollection” objects at debug-time. Very nice.
Oh, and while I’m at it … there’s a short stack of other add-ins that I still need to try out (in rough order of how excited I am about them).
- XPathMania adds proper XPath query support to Visual Studio so you can test your XPath statements against the current document in the XML editor, this is something I’ve been needing for a while.
- SiteMap Editor provides a structured UI for editing sitemap XML.
- SmartOutline enhances the “region” capability of Visual Studio to allow regions that weren’t possible before, even creating regions from if statements, and it also persists the collapsed state.
- CodeKeep is the ultimate collection of source-code snippets, with a corresponding add-in for Visual Studio 2005 so you can drag-and-drop snippets into the editor
- The ControlTree Visualizer lets you see the control hierarchy on a web page during debugging, which should prove invaluable with some of my ASP.NET AJAX bugs…
- Control Visualizer is another ASP.NET debugging visualizer from the same guy that wrote the by-now-famous Cache Visualizer
- PInvoke.net is actually a website — which I find very valuable (especially when I’m working on shell-related stuff in .NET) — I generally look up API calls on the website, but they also have an add-in for looking things up from within Visual Studio. I may just have to install this when I start coding for fun (instead of for school) again.
Oh, and a random little link to Regulazy a regular expression tool for the rest of you (who can’t tell a \d{2} from a \w+). This isn’t an add in, but it is a really clever way to build regular expressions from a sample string that you want to match.
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