Productivity Power Tools – the whole truth

I wanted to dedicate today’s entry to the addition of Visual Studio, without whom I, that you can not work. Persons, which did not use it do not know what they are missing. This addition is Productivity Power Tools. It is free and can be downloaded from http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/d0d33361-18e2-46c0-8ff2-4adea1e34fef.

Installation is extremely simple. Just keep in mind, that you need to reset after installation Visual Studio. But to the point – What we can gain after the installation of this tool. First of all time. It contains many interesting additions, I want you to briefly switch.

I was wondering where to start. Is the most exciting features, whether it can turn. But I decided to turn.

After installing this add-on for Visual Studio there is an additional tab to configure:

Here you can enable, or disable add-ons, that make up the tool. By default, everything is included and there is no need to look.

So start with this add-on tour. Let me start from the things without which I can not imagine working out – Solution Navigator. This is in addition completely replacing the Solution Explorer.

In comparison to the Solution Explorer, and allows the addition of:

• searching walkthrough (the file names, class, methods, properties, attributes),
• navigate the walkthrough with the possibility of going to classes – double-click on the item to jump to that item.
• view open to the elements of plants, not recorded and edited.

For me, the most important advantage of this addition is searching. Although Visual Studio has in itself this functionality, I find it interesting after my classes I always had trouble locating an item in the project found – here gets immediately the exact position of the.

Another feature is completely revised to add reference dialog.

We find in him the ability to sort. After entering the name will narrow the list of references to elements that match a pattern. Additionally, you can select how to sort.

Another interesting feature is a completely new way of working with bookmarks.

As you can see tabs have different colours. This is not the case because the tabs of each colour is assigned a specific project. This allows you to very easily see where they come from individual files. In addition, can also cause, the pinned tab will be shown on a separate line.

If this is not enough you can also change the location of the bookmarks:

In the case of widescreen monitors allow us to display more bookmarks. Additionally, the tabs can be seen, that the file has been modified – the little red dot in the tab License.cs. Configuration possibilities are huge this item.

The above three features of this Appendix are most useful things. But besides this in Visual Studio there are many smaller improvements:

• Highlighting the active line

• Instant Access – by pressing the Ctrl + 3 window appears where you can enter the command, we want to do in Visual Studio (eg. set design, which is to run).

• Automatic closing of duplicate items, tj. {}, (), “”, <>, []
• Select all links by clicking on it three times
• Move to the element definition – pressing the Ctrl + click
• Moving blocks of code – Old + up arrow / Down
• Unification of defining spaces – space / tabulator. In a situation, when used in the file are different ways at the same time bar will appear in which you can choose the manner to which it is to be unified:
• Copy the code in HTML to the clipboard
• Colored parameters in IntelliSense – so that they can be easily read

• and much more.

In conclusion I, that every programmer should install this experimental, even for the former functions. Ne, it will certainly save you some time.