There is no denying - Visual Studio 2010 is a world class development environment. However, everyone has the little things they like, keyboard shortcuts and the like. Changing keyboard shortcuts is easy enough (Tools
> Options > General > Keyboard) but I've recently looked into extensions. Some of them are great - here is a showcase of the ones I've just installed.
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Productivity Power Kit - Published by Microsoft
This kit has lots of useful parts to it - what I mainly wanted it for was the auto close bracket functionality, but it has other useful parts to it that I think I will make use of - custom scrollbars, middle click scrolling, Solution Navigator, Tab Well UI and lots of little options and tools that make Visual Studio nicer to use! Recommend this for any user of Visual Studio.
Color Printing - Published by Microsoft
Kind of self explanatory, allows you to print code out in syntax highlighted colours. Great little tweak that should probably be a tickbox for default printing.
Spell Checker - Published by Noah Richards
Checks the spelling in comments, strings in source code and HTML. Makes the little squiggly line similar to Word. Again, should be a default setting really but glad someone has fixed it! Noah Richards also makes some other nice little tweak like extensions which could be useful!
Indent Guides - Published by Zooba (Steve Dower)
This was one of the little gripes I had with Visual Studio when I started using it - I was used to Notepad++ where the indent lines were used by default when I used to do Python - I find them incredibly useful and makes the code, for me, far easier to read! If you don't get what I mean, here is a screenshot of it in action.
A nice little tweak - simply hides the main menu from view when you don't need it. You can access it by simply pressing the Alt key, or by using other shortcuts to access the menus (such as Alt + F to bring up the File menu). Just personally, I like this very much - I like all the screen estate I can get!
Visual Studio Achievements - Published by Microsoft/Channel 9
As it says on the tin again - Microsoft in all its wisdom have decided to add achievements to programming. I think this is a great idea to get new programmers more into it, and exploring more complex aspects of coding. However, I do think that getting current or veteran programmers into it will be more difficult. I installed it for fun, and maybe I'll publish that i've done a hard one from time to time!
So that's my rundown for now. If you have any you like using, comment away!
