The must have tools for C# development

Visual Studio 2010

I don’t think Visual Studio needs an introduction. VS 2010 brought us .NET 4.0 that contains a lot of new goodies!

ReSharper

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 for Visual Studio 2010

    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

    Visual Studio 2010 – Productivity Power Tools

    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.

Peter

.NET, C#

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