I Missed the Visual Studio Productivity Tools

Tonight I rediscovered how much I love the Visual Studio Productivity Tools. Why? Because I rebuilt a PC last week and I had yet to install them. Sure, I installed VS, SP 1 and Resharper … all of which are essential to me as a developer. But I had not realized how much I was using the Productivity Power Tools. So I thought I might share a few of my favorite features.

Before I begin ….

Tools Options

One thing I don’t like is the Highlight Current Line is always on. I like my own color scheme so the first thing I do is turn this off.

I won’t go too deep into the features as you can check them all out here, but my top ones are:

Enhanced Find

Hit Ctrl + F you get a pop up find window which accepts regular expressions and brings you right to the “found” item. Simple, sure, but less intrusive and more powerful than the built in Find.

Solution ~~Explorer~~ Navigator

Filter files, show just the opened or unsaved files, search for class members, multiple file selection and drag/drop, and much more. Its like Solution Explorer on steroids. My favorite keystroke here is Ctrl+2 to navigate to a class in a file.

Add Reference

This is how add reference should have been built . You can search for assemblies, filter them, and see detailed information about them. It’s also smart enough to warn you about multi targeting issues.

Tab Behavior

There is a ton of new tab behavior added, but my favorites are:

Ctrl+Num Pad n to activate the nth tab
Show pinned tabs in their own row (nice for grouping a set)
Sorting tabs by project within a solution or alphabetically (or both)
Tab UI coloring … by project is my favorite, but you can do this by regular expression too

Quick Access

This is a generic jumping off point for doing something quickly. It opens up a dialog and you can type a command in which will then filter down the available ones. Pretty nifty and quick, especially when you forget those keystrokes or where they are in the menus.