Improving Your Visual Studio Workspace - Packages
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There are packages that promise to increase you productivity by 100 percent and even more. They offer a good part of what the tools manage to do on the previous page, and of course extend it with a personal touch. Most of them are quite costly. Nevertheless, once you've spent some time coding with one of them you will rapidly realize that they are worth every cent.
There is a free alternative, sort of, under the name DPack. This on its own manages to impress, however once you try either Resharper or Visual Assist it will appear pale in comparison. Still, for those of you who cannot afford one of the previous packages, this is a "must have" addition to the Visual Studio.
The advantage of Assist is that Resharper does not work with C++, and Assist does. You are free to download it and try it out, as there is a trial period of 30 days. First, it will let you further improve the coloring of the IDE as you can choose with what color to display classes, variables and so forth, giving you an even better view of the code.
The add-on offers a large set of tools. I will not enumerate each one of them; instead, I'll present you with a picture of the menu. My personal favorites that I think MS should absolutely implement inside Visual Studio 2010 are the Open Corresponding File, Open File in Solution (a sort of Flat Solution Viewer, but more fancy) and the spell check.
The refactoring options are also diverse and will save you much time that you would have otherwise spent doing it manually. The rename option is also priceless, allowing you to use a shorter name while you are developing; when you are finished, you can just use rename again to give it a more descriptive handle.
Still, one of the best things I found in all of this is the internal Intellisense. As much as Microsoft tried to make it work close to perfect, I find that many times, inside complex solutions, Intellisense simply refuses to work. Pretty soon posts appear on forums with the topic title "I Hate Intellisense."
I have never had this kind of problem with Visual Assist. Even after all this, the most powerful part of the package remains the VA Snippets. Using this, you can bind specific code generation scenarios to certain texts. Consider it Intellisense on steroids.
For example, you can create a VA snippet for the code #f. Whenever you enter this, Intellisense will come up and offer you the option to insert the previously defined text. Inside the text, some system variables will allow the entering of the current time, date, user and so on.
In a similar way, you can define various class creation methods after entering the keyword class. The option to input text inside a textbox for on-the-fly written text is also available, as you can see from the picture below. The sky is the limit; it is all about using your imagination to get the most out of this tool.
With this, we've arrived at the end of the article. I invite you to share with us what great add-on and/or tool you have just discovered or use on a daily basis. For this, the blog following the article will serve, and if you liked the article, please rate it. And you can always join our friendly forum at DevHardware and express your thoughts there. Live With Passion!
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