6 ms·

Visual Studio 2015 Extensions You Might Find Useful

64 points by douche 10y ago

Stratoscope 10y ago
Here are a few more that I use: EditorConfig - Reads your .editorconfig files and applies their settings. Markdown Editor - Edit Markdown with live preview. Smooth Scrolling - Use smooth scrolling instead of jumpy scrolling, nice for two-finger touchpad scrolling. There are also two different extensions named "Smooth Scroll" (no "ing") that do similar things. I've had one or another of these work better depending on the machine. Strip'em - Force consistent newlines when files are saved. (Note this is not in the extension gallery, you have to get it from the developer's site.) TabSanity - For projects that insist on spaces for indentation, makes the left and right arrow keys jump a full indent level instead of one space. Text Macros for Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015 - Adds some of the keyboard macro support that went AWOL some years ago. And of course things like ReSharper or Visual Assist, plus language specific extensions like HLSL Tools, PowerShell Tools, Python Tools, etc.
- RossBencina 10y ago
  +1 for EditorConfig Free ones I also use: Trailing Whitespace Visualiser -- marks trailing whitespace in red and can automatically strip it on save. Editor Guidelines -- Fixed vertical column guides ArrayPlotter -- plot data in arrays on a x/y graph cppcheck add-in -- run cppcheck from within MSVC And Visual Assist of course.
  - Stratoscope 10y ago
    Thanks, a few of those are new to me - I will check them out!
- retro64 10y ago
  >TabSanity - For projects that insist on spaces for indentation, makes the left and right arrow keys jump a full indent level instead of one space. Hold your control key down while hitting right/left arrow. This will jump to the beginning or end of the next word (effectively skipping the tab/spaces). Now you can remove an extension! :) 
  - Stratoscope 10y ago
    Thanks. I do use ctrl+left/right all the time, along with their friends ctrl+shift+left/right. The Home key is also handy since it toggles between the beginning of the line and the first non-whitespace character on the line. I still like TabSanity, though. Perhaps it's because I use tabs in all my own projects and I like the way the left-right keys move one indent at a time. So having those keys work the same way with space indentation has a certain comfort to it.
LyalinDotCom 10y ago
Great list! We've also been blogging about extensions to give folks visibility into new ones to explore, here is one example: New and Noteworthy Extensions for Visual Studio – April 2016: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/05/02/new-noteworthy-visual-studio-extensions-april-2016/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/05/02/new... You can find the other posts and related ones using this tag filter on our official Visual Studio team blog: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/tag/extensions/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/tag/extensions...
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
As an Emacs user, I'm looking to see anything I'd find useful here... nope. The few useful ones have Emacs equivalents, and most of them wouldn't even qualify as extesions: they're just snippets I'd drop in my .emacs file.
- barpet 10y ago
  Well. Emacs is trying to be everything and is extremely powerful. VS on the other hand is better in its own domain than Emacs.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    But what IS the VS domain? Is it just plain text editing? Because Emacs can smash it at that. Is is programming? Because Emacs beats it in the general case at that, too. Is it programming in a very specific language? This is where it starts to win out, but I don't want to switch editors every time I switch languages, and Emacs does all of that Good Enough. It even has semantic autocomplete in some languages at this point. The only thing it's missing is refactoring tools, which aren't as important when you're not writing Java.
    - janwillemb 10y ago
      Have you ever programmed in C#? That's what VS is good at.
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        The point I made in the post is that while VS might be better with C#, Emacs works well with everything, works Good Enough with most languages, and pretty good for C#. In fact, looking over the feature list for Emacs C# editing (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CSharpMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CSharpMode), I can't find anything obviously missing from VS. In any case, I don't want to learn a new environment every time I change languages.
        10y ago
mentos 10y ago
Visual Assist was helpful for Unreal Engine 4 programming as the default VS code completion was insanely slow
- Stratoscope 10y ago
  Oh, that is good to know! I have both Visual Assist and ReSharper but have been mostly been using ReSharper lately. Will try Visual Assist for the next UE4 work I do.
- nightski 10y ago
  May have to try Visual Assist again since ReSharper moved to this awful licensing model and is getting increasingly slower with every release.
daheza 10y ago
As someone who uses visual studio at work everyday I often find it incredibly slow and thats even without any extensions. I am curious if you use VS do you use it on windows severs or are you running windows 10? Also as far as the slowness often how large are you projects? Do you run your TFS work space local or server?
- douche 10y ago
  The only thing that it really chokes and dies on is if I try to open a mix of C#, SQL, JS and HTML files at the same time. I'm not totally sure what it is doing or analyzing, but the memory usage jumps up to somewhere north of 2GB with a lot of disk thrashing, when I might have 200 kb of text files open. JavaScript intellisense seems to be the most likely culprit, to the point that I have gotten in the habit of doing all front-end editing work in WebStorm, and reserving VS for the backend code, which is a much happier experience. This is on Windows 10, with a solution of about 15-25 projects. At one point it was close to 100K LOC, but that was before we went in with fire and sword to remove some terrible, terrible amounts of redundancy, so it's considerably less now.
- DenisM 10y ago
  Im using it on windows server 2008r2 it works fine. The only thing that slows things down for me is opening a sql file, so I never do that.
- vardump 10y ago
  I have also similar issues with VS2015. It's painfully slow without any extensions installed, even with a relatively small 200 kloc C++ project. Just switching between source code tabs takes about 2 seconds.
- oxidize 10y ago
  In my experience with vs2015 and Windows 10, Windows defender can cause big slow downs. Try to add scan exceptions for devenv.exe and your development folders. Your mileage may vary.
FrancoDiaz 10y ago
I have a ton of extensions for VS 2015. I'm getting worried though that they all are collectively bogging down Visual Studio. Is there a way to profile what is causing freezes in VS?
DenisM 10y ago
This might b a good place to ask - is there a way to browse c# source code by traversing dependency graph instead of a list of files? I feel that there has to be...
- loco5niner 10y ago
  Perhaps Code Map is what you are looking for? https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj739835.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj739835.aspx (Requires Enterprise to create and make edits, Professional can open and make minimal edits) (actually this is the better link for mapping dependencies: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409453.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409453.aspx)
iamcreasy 10y ago
Anybody knows similar extensions/plugins like Viasfora for IntellijIDEA? I'd love to have some scope highlighter when inside a nested if-else.(Java)
to3m 10y ago
Since we're sharing, here are some good addons that I like: - https://github.com/tom-seddon/VSScripts https://github.com/tom-seddon/VSScripts (disclaimer: written by me - however I didn't write it because I think it's useless!) - insert text by printing from command line tools, and alter text by piping selection through a command line tool - http://www.usysware.com/dpack/ http://www.usysware.com/dpack/ - addons that improve the code browsing experience a bit (I particularly like the methods and file browsers) - https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1290e058-33da-485f-9b75-1891abc947b3 https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1290e058-33da... - word-wraps comments for you. An absolute godsend if you want to write meaningful comments without going nuts - https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1141bff-463f-465f-9b6d-d29b7b503d7a https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1141bff-463f... - makes the debugger auto-attach to child processes when launched by your main process. Highly recommended if you work with multi-process stuff - the out-of-the-box UX for debugging that sort of thing isn't great, but in my view this pretty much fixes it

64 points by douche 10y ago

Here are a few more that I use: EditorConfig - Reads your .editorconfig files and applies their settings. Markdown Editor - Edit Markdown with live preview. Smooth Scrolling - Use smooth scrolling instead of jumpy scrolling, nice for two-finger touchpad scrolling. There are also two different extensions named "Smooth Scroll" (no "ing") that do similar things. I've had one or another of these work better depending on the machine. Strip'em - Force consistent newlines when files are saved. (Note this is not in the extension gallery, you have to get it from the developer's site.) TabSanity - For projects that insist on spaces for indentation, makes the left and right arrow keys jump a full indent level instead of one space. Text Macros for Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015 - Adds some of the keyboard macro support that went AWOL some years ago. And of course things like ReSharper or Visual Assist, plus language specific extensions like HLSL Tools, PowerShell Tools, Python Tools, etc.

RossBencina 10y ago
+1 for EditorConfig Free ones I also use: Trailing Whitespace Visualiser -- marks trailing whitespace in red and can automatically strip it on save. Editor Guidelines -- Fixed vertical column guides ArrayPlotter -- plot data in arrays on a x/y graph cppcheck add-in -- run cppcheck from within MSVC And Visual Assist of course.
- Stratoscope 10y ago
  Thanks, a few of those are new to me - I will check them out!
retro64 10y ago
>TabSanity - For projects that insist on spaces for indentation, makes the left and right arrow keys jump a full indent level instead of one space. Hold your control key down while hitting right/left arrow. This will jump to the beginning or end of the next word (effectively skipping the tab/spaces). Now you can remove an extension! :) 
- Stratoscope 10y ago
  Thanks. I do use ctrl+left/right all the time, along with their friends ctrl+shift+left/right. The Home key is also handy since it toggles between the beginning of the line and the first non-whitespace character on the line. I still like TabSanity, though. Perhaps it's because I use tabs in all my own projects and I like the way the left-right keys move one indent at a time. So having those keys work the same way with space indentation has a certain comfort to it.

LyalinDotCom 10y ago

Great list! We've also been blogging about extensions to give folks visibility into new ones to explore, here is one example: New and Noteworthy Extensions for Visual Studio – April 2016: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/05/02/new-noteworthy-visual-studio-extensions-april-2016/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/05/02/new... You can find the other posts and related ones using this tag filter on our official Visual Studio team blog: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/tag/extensions/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/tag/extensions...

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

As an Emacs user, I'm looking to see anything I'd find useful here... nope. The few useful ones have Emacs equivalents, and most of them wouldn't even qualify as extesions: they're just snippets I'd drop in my .emacs file.

barpet 10y ago
Well. Emacs is trying to be everything and is extremely powerful. VS on the other hand is better in its own domain than Emacs.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  But what IS the VS domain? Is it just plain text editing? Because Emacs can smash it at that. Is is programming? Because Emacs beats it in the general case at that, too. Is it programming in a very specific language? This is where it starts to win out, but I don't want to switch editors every time I switch languages, and Emacs does all of that Good Enough. It even has semantic autocomplete in some languages at this point. The only thing it's missing is refactoring tools, which aren't as important when you're not writing Java.
  - janwillemb 10y ago
    Have you ever programmed in C#? That's what VS is good at.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      The point I made in the post is that while VS might be better with C#, Emacs works well with everything, works Good Enough with most languages, and pretty good for C#. In fact, looking over the feature list for Emacs C# editing (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CSharpMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CSharpMode), I can't find anything obviously missing from VS. In any case, I don't want to learn a new environment every time I change languages.
      - 10y ago

mentos 10y ago

Visual Assist was helpful for Unreal Engine 4 programming as the default VS code completion was insanely slow

Stratoscope 10y ago
Oh, that is good to know! I have both Visual Assist and ReSharper but have been mostly been using ReSharper lately. Will try Visual Assist for the next UE4 work I do.
nightski 10y ago
May have to try Visual Assist again since ReSharper moved to this awful licensing model and is getting increasingly slower with every release.

daheza 10y ago

As someone who uses visual studio at work everyday I often find it incredibly slow and thats even without any extensions. I am curious if you use VS do you use it on windows severs or are you running windows 10? Also as far as the slowness often how large are you projects? Do you run your TFS work space local or server?

douche 10y ago
The only thing that it really chokes and dies on is if I try to open a mix of C#, SQL, JS and HTML files at the same time. I'm not totally sure what it is doing or analyzing, but the memory usage jumps up to somewhere north of 2GB with a lot of disk thrashing, when I might have 200 kb of text files open. JavaScript intellisense seems to be the most likely culprit, to the point that I have gotten in the habit of doing all front-end editing work in WebStorm, and reserving VS for the backend code, which is a much happier experience. This is on Windows 10, with a solution of about 15-25 projects. At one point it was close to 100K LOC, but that was before we went in with fire and sword to remove some terrible, terrible amounts of redundancy, so it's considerably less now.
DenisM 10y ago
Im using it on windows server 2008r2 it works fine. The only thing that slows things down for me is opening a sql file, so I never do that.
vardump 10y ago
I have also similar issues with VS2015. It's painfully slow without any extensions installed, even with a relatively small 200 kloc C++ project. Just switching between source code tabs takes about 2 seconds.
oxidize 10y ago
In my experience with vs2015 and Windows 10, Windows defender can cause big slow downs. Try to add scan exceptions for devenv.exe and your development folders. Your mileage may vary.

FrancoDiaz 10y ago

I have a ton of extensions for VS 2015. I'm getting worried though that they all are collectively bogging down Visual Studio. Is there a way to profile what is causing freezes in VS?

DenisM 10y ago

This might b a good place to ask - is there a way to browse c# source code by traversing dependency graph instead of a list of files? I feel that there has to be...

loco5niner 10y ago
Perhaps Code Map is what you are looking for? https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj739835.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj739835.aspx (Requires Enterprise to create and make edits, Professional can open and make minimal edits) (actually this is the better link for mapping dependencies: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409453.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409453.aspx)

iamcreasy 10y ago

Anybody knows similar extensions/plugins like Viasfora for IntellijIDEA? I'd love to have some scope highlighter when inside a nested if-else.(Java)

to3m 10y ago

Since we're sharing, here are some good addons that I like: - https://github.com/tom-seddon/VSScripts https://github.com/tom-seddon/VSScripts (disclaimer: written by me - however I didn't write it because I think it's useless!) - insert text by printing from command line tools, and alter text by piping selection through a command line tool - http://www.usysware.com/dpack/ http://www.usysware.com/dpack/ - addons that improve the code browsing experience a bit (I particularly like the methods and file browsers) - https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1290e058-33da-485f-9b75-1891abc947b3 https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1290e058-33da... - word-wraps comments for you. An absolute godsend if you want to write meaningful comments without going nuts - https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1141bff-463f-465f-9b6d-d29b7b503d7a https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1141bff-463f... - makes the debugger auto-attach to child processes when launched by your main process. Highly recommended if you work with multi-process stuff - the out-of-the-box UX for debugging that sort of thing isn't great, but in my view this pretty much fixes it