Improving Your Visual Studio Workspace
(Page 1 of 4 )
Click. Click again. Start up your file browser. Search it. Drag it. Find a file inside the solution. Find the function with the name xyz. Do it again. When you are a developer working on larger projects, you wonder why you have to do this manually, the boring and repetitive way. There must be a few tools that can work seamlessly. Today we bring you the best modifications/add-ons for one of the most-used developer tools: Visual Studio from Microsoft.
The vast majority of developers will tell you a single name when you ask them for a reliable and quality IDE they use for writing code, and as soon as they are finished, to compile and execute it. This is Visual Studio from Microsoft. Although there are a few alternatives on the Internet, other than "Netbeans" for the Java Development side, nobody else has really managed to grab significant market share from the Redmond giant.
At least this is what the situation appears to be on the Windows operating system. According to the statistics from the World Wide Web Consortium, the Microsoft counterparts represented by Mac OS X and Linux have together 12 percent (eight and four respectively). Therefore, we can conclude that Microsoft Visual Studio is the dominant software developer tool/environment today.
However, with version nine arriving at the end of 2007 with Visual Studio 2008, the product is still far from perfect. Once you've deeply entered into working with it, you will soon feel that this could be done so much more easily, and if this would work like this or like that, everything would be much simpler.
Luckily for us, the Microsoft Visual Studio team learned from their earlier experiences. Watching the popularity of the Firefox browser due to its ability to be expanded (i.e. its plug-in system), they left a door open for developers brave enough to modify the tool for their own needs and, at request, extend it.
Now during this article I will not discuss how to do that. Instead, I will present a couple of great tools that will speed up your coding, eliminate repetitive, boring work and let you focus on the algorithm/code itself rather than on how you write it down.
First, I will look at the re-coloring the environment, and follow that with presenting a set of tools that helps you create, extend and maintain your code snippets. I am talking about add-ons to Visual Studio that will add new functions and make wonders happen with a click. In the end, I will present one of the two most comprehensive and famous add-on packages on the market currently: Resharper from JetBrains and Visual Assist from Whole Tomato Software. We will focus on the latter one.
Next: Playing with the colors >>
More BrainDump Articles
More By Gabor Bernat
