Improve your productivity with VisualStudio 2010- Productivity Power Tools

Are you a smart visual studio 2010 developer? If you want to be then this post is for you. This post is for Visual Studio 2010 users to get productive while working. Whatever you want to have in your VS release, is here. While writing the code, another task is to manage the things around you and this tool will help you by providing everything on the table. Best features ever seen with good UI and at very small cost of performance overhead if you have minimal requirement of hardware configuration for VS2010.

First Go and Download the VS2010 Productivity Power Tool from here.

Download ProPowerTools

Installation is as smooth as like any other plugin. After Installing you may want to visit the features that I liked most.

There's lots of things you would see are available as options to quick clicks. but below are my favorites and I use them massively.

1. Improved Add reference prompt box with search

This is one of the feature I've ever waited for, because manually going through and finding the references of assembly..ohh that sucks!! But now you can just type in the search box and everything that matches gets filtered and you can select it with a plus box there you can add more if you want and then just close the box when you're done. and its loaded fast.



2. Quick Access

Quick Access is a new tool window that allows users to search for and execute common tasks within the Visual Studio IDE. Not sure where a particular menu command is located? Want a quick way to create a new Silverlight project? By using Quick Access, you can efficiently find and execute common VS operations without taking your hands off the keyboard. Quick Access allows users to:

• Execute Main Menu and Context Menu commands
• Open the New Project Dialog with a specific Project Template selected
• Show a tool window
• Jump to a Visual Studio Options page
• Navigate to an open document in your Tab Well
• Create and execute a series of actions (task)

To use, press Ctrl+3 to launch Quick Access, type in your search term (e.g., "debug"), and press Enter on the desired result. If your search term returns too many results, continue pressing Ctrl+3 to cycle through each category of results.

3. Auto Brace Completion

Automatic Brace Completion improves the productivity of writing code by automatically inserting the closing code construct when the opening construct is typed for VB & C#. More specifically, this extension:

• Supports the following constructs: (), {}, [], <>, "", and ''.
• Allows you to press <TAB> to navigate past the next enclosing brace
• Allows you to automatically complete a statement in C# by inserting the closing semi-colon and moving you to the next line with SHIFT + ENTER

The extensions from the previous Productivity Power Tools have been included and improved.

4. HTML Copy

If you are a blogger then you'll love it cause you may want to copy the code as HTML when you add it to your post. I'm telling you it's a worth utility. you'll no longer have to go fix up the formatting of your code when you paste it into a TFS bug form or any other HTML based control. It is possible to modify the html format which gets copied to the clipboard and with the release you now have the ability to customize that to suite your needs. You can go to Tools | Options | Productivity Power Tools | HTML Copy or Simply just press CTRL + 3 and type "HTML COPY"

5. Triple Click

It's never been easier to select a line of code from the mouse by simple triple-clicking anywhere on the line.

6. Move Line Up/Down Commands

This is pretty cool..! This extension maps the Alt+Up Arrow & Alt+Down Arrow keys such that they will move the current line of code or the selected lines up and down through the editor.

7. Enhanced Tool Tip

Navigate directly to the Definitions and see just by expanding the nodes what's inside.



8. Turn Off the Features you don't like or want to use

Ahh.. and at last there is lots of extensions in there, few must be helpful for you but not all so whatever feature you feels annoying you just go to Tools | Options | Productivity Power Tools and find the extension on the right (remember to scroll!). It requires a restart of Visual Studio to change effect.



The above list is something I liked most out of this Productivity Power Tools. I hope you will find more useful ways to utilize them all.

I hope you like this post.