What Visual Studio plugins would you consider essential for a new(ish)/returning C# developer?

Question

I've been a developer for about 20 years now, and did some C# about 5 years ago.

What Visual Studio plugins would you say I couldn't/shouldn't live without? They could help with:

Language Constructs .Net Framework Generating stub code to speed things up

Thanks!

Answer 1

JetBrains ReSharper which really enhances the IDE and helps with best practices, refactoring, etc. (It looks like DevExpress CodeRush is another alternative)

RedGate .Net Reflector to help understand the ins and outs of how things are working "behind the scenes".

GhostDoc is nice if you're using XML comments to document your code.

TestDriven.NET is great if you're doing Test Driven Development (or any kind of Unit Testing, really).

And while I haven't used it personally (but plan to try it, now that I found it), MetalScroll looks like a very helpful tool when working with large code files. It replaces the scrollbar with a scroll-able document preview.

Answer 2

to make visual studio comparable to other IDEs, you really need either DevExpress CodeRush, or (my personal favorite) JetBrains ReSharper

Answer 3

Power Commands has a lot of very useful features which make using Visual Studio a little easier.

GhostDoc is also great for generating comments in your code.

They're both free.

Answer 4

The obvious resharper and reflector others have mentioned. I have a few dozen, but they're for particular tasks. Some of the more general ones I use:

Pro Power Tools

PowerCommands

VsCommands

Tangible T4 Editor

IronPython & IronRuby Console (requires PowerConsole)