My seven favourite, free, Visual Studio plugins

Published: January 9, 2010
My seven favourite, free, Visual Studio plugins

GhostDoc

This great little plugin, written by Roland Weigelt, will automatically generate XML comments for your classes and methods. If you follow the Microsoft coding conventions then it gives great results and I actually find that it’s a great second opinion on the name of your class or method. Generally if GhostDoc understands the name then it will make sense to another developer, or yourself next time you look at it.

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Regionerate

Automagically organise your code alphabetically and into logical regions. Regionerate even lets you define your own custom layouts if you want a specific house style. I love this because it enables consistent layouts when working in a team so any developer can quickly and easily get an overview of a class’s layout.

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Clarius Visual T4

The Text Templating Transformation Toolkit or t4 for short is a code generator built into Visual Studio. However using it is a bit of a dark art because there’s no tooling in VS to help you work with it. Fortunately the nice people at Clarius have a plugin that provides syntax highlighting and other goodness for t4 files. There’s a paid version with more features but the free one is great if you want to get started working with/understanding t4.

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CodeRush XPress for C#

Microsoft and Developer Express have got together to release a free version of the CodeRush plugin which provides  a huge number of refactoring, navigation and declaration features. I know a lot of developers find that Visual Studio is limited in these features and compared to IDEs like Eclipse I’d have to agree. You get all the following:

Editor Features

  • Duplicate Line
  • Highlight Usages
  • Clipboard Features
    • Smart Cut/Copy
    • Paste Replace
  • Enhanced Selection Abilities
    • Extend/reduce selection
    • Camel-case selection

Navigation Features

  • Camel-case Navigation
  • Tab to Next Reference
  • Go to File
  • Go to Symbol (QuickNav)

TDD – Declaration from Usage

  • Types
    • Declare Class
    • Declare Delegate
    • Declare Enum
    • Declare Enum Element
    • Declare Interface
    • Declare Struct
  • Members
    • Declare Constructor
    • Declare Event Handler
    • Declare Getter
    • Declare Method
    • Declare Property
    • Declare Property (auto-implemented)
    • Declare Property (with backing field)
    • Declare Setter
  • Variables
    • Declare Field
    • Declare Local
    • Declare Local (implicit)

Refactorings

  • Add/Remove Block Delimiters
  • Combine Conditionals (merge nested “If” statements)
  • Compress to Lambda Expression
  • Compress to Ternary Expression
  • Convert to Auto-implemented Property
  • Convert to Initializer (use object/collection initialize when possible)
  • Create Backing Store (converts Auto-implemented Property to standard Property with get and set)
  • Decompose Initializer
  • Decompose Parameter
  • Expand Lambda Expression
  • Expand Ternary Expression
  • Extract Method to Type
  • Flatten Conditional
  • Introduce Local (introduce variable)
  • Inline Delegate
  • Inline Temp (inline variable)
  • Make Explicit
  • Make Implicit
  • Move Type to File
  • Name Anonymous Method
  • Name Anonymous Type
  • Reverse Conditional (invert “if”)
  • Split Conditional (split complex “If” statements)
  • Use StringBuilder
  • Use String.Format

Check out the download link for more details.

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PowerCommands for Visual Studio

Another free plug-in from Microsoft but this one exposes a load of existing functionality as  menu items and automates some other pre-existing functionality. My personal favourites:

  • Open Command Prompt
    Opens a Visual Studio command prompt pointing to the physical path of a selected item.
  • Open Containing Folder
    Opens a Windows Explorer window pointing to the physical path of a selected item.
  • Remove and Sort Usings
    Removes and sort using statements for all classes given a project.

Check the download link for more details.

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One issue I’ve noticed with this plug-in is that the Undo Close window keeps opening. If you’re having that problem you can edit the registry as follows to fix this (warning registry edits may do bad things if they go wrong, backup first):

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ToolWindows\{eccc9e97-fd3b-4c15-af76-ef71a71d8b17} and delete the Visibility subkey.

DocProject for Sandcastle

If you’ve got loads of good comments in your code why not build some docs using them. You’ll need Sandcastle but once you have it and this plugin you’ll be able to automate building comments based on a number of templates directly from within Visual Studio.

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TestDriven.net

This last one is only free for open source, student and trial users but I still think it’s worth mentioning. Basically it allows you to work with the following all from inside Visual Studio, great for working smarter directly from inside your IDE.

Check the download link for more details.

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