The must have tools for C# development
I don’t think Visual Studio needs an introduction. VS 2010 brought us .NET 4.0 that contains a lot of new goodies!
ReSharper is the absolut must have for Visual Studio. It provides very improved navigation and search, refactoring, code generation, code cleanup and unit testing. I have gotten so used to having ReSharper installed so today I have a really hard time using Visual Studio without it.
Some useful shortcuts
- Ctrl+T : Go to type
- Ctrl+Shift-T : Go to file
- Alt-Ins: Generate code (constructors, properties, implementing/overriding members)
- Alt+Enter : Show available quick-fixes and context actions
- Ctrl+Space : Symbol Code Completion
- Ctrl+Alt+Space : Smart Code Completion
- Shift+F12 : Find usages
- Ctrl+Shift+R : Refactor this
- Ctrl+R+R : Rename this
- Ctrl+R+M: Extract method
- Ctrl+R+V : Introduce variable
- Ctrl+R+F : Introduce field
- Ctrl+R+P : Introduce parameter
- Alt+Shift+L : Locate in Solution Explore
PowerCommands 10.0 is a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2010 adding additional functionality to various areas Visual Studio. This is some of the commands I find must useful:
- Copy References
- Paste References
- Copy As Project Reference
- Edit Project File
- Open Containing Folder
- Open Command Prompt Here
- Unload Projects
- Reload Projects
Productivity Power Tools from the Microsoft Visual Studio team contains a lot of great extensions
- Very much improved dialog for add reference
- Solution Naigator – a enhanced Solution Explorer
- Improved tab system for editor
- Highlight current line (isn’t it weird that VS is missing this feature?)
One annoying ‘feature’ is the triple click to navigate to source, never got it to work properly so I disabled it. Some shortcuts also colide with ReSharper so some tweaking is needed to make it work perfectly.
Learned a new resharper shortcut today, goto file member: alt+0. Totally awesome!
This localization add-in is also extremely useful: http://www.hexadigm.com