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.