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Visual studio is a powerful tool itself, but there is a lot of free and commercial extensions making a developer’s life easier. Below I put a list of extensions worth checking, hoping they fit your style of development:

KillCassini
A Visual Studio extension to kill all instances of Asp.Net Web Development Server (Cassini) or IISExpress with one click. It’s a lifesaver when IIS freaks out.

Web Essentials
A must have for web developers, supports: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, CoffeeScript and LESS. Some of the cool features are: live css editing (your website updates when the css change), highlighting, intellisense, filling in missing standards and taking care of best practices. Read more here.

StyleCop
StyleCop checks C# source code to enforce consistency rules and best practices. This tool prevents writing spaghetti code by all team members, following the principle “don’t be lazy and refactor this dude”. It can be run from inside of Visual Studio or integrated into an MSBuild. StyleCop integrates into many third-party development tools including tortoiseSVN, so you can check the code before each commit.

Code Compare
Very handy comparison tool, available as Visual Studio add-in or a standalone app, for comparing and merging files/folders. Supports syntax highlighting and shows code line changes.

Spell Checker
An editor extension dedicated to people doing a lot of speling mistakes. Spell checker will highlight bad comments, strings or plain text. You can use it in different areas (entire solution, project or selected items). Settings allow to add multiple languages and define custom ones.

Image optimizer
Optimizes PNG, GIF and JPG file sizes without quality loss, working on a single file or folder from solution explorer’s context menu.

Open command line
Nothing more, nothing less, just opens a command line at the root of the project. Supports cmd, powershell, bash. Provides syntax highlighting, Intellisense and execution of .cmd and .bat files.

TextGenerator
Simple tool to quickly generate dummy text, you can choose a dictionary (including immortal “Lorem Ipsum”) and define how many words you need.

Regex Tester
Helpful application supporting work with regex syntax, including some interesting features like text replacement.

Productivity Power Tools
A set of extensions which improve developer productivity, it’s free and has a lot cool features. Since I am using ReSharper, my favorite one is coloring open file tabs per project.

Resharper
Last but not least, in my opinion the heavyweight champion of all tools, an intelligent extension that supports C#, XAML, XML, ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC. Using this tool makes code cleaner and more efficient. It’s not cheap but definitely worth it, try the 30-day trial version for free. Here you can find my favorite shortcuts.

There is a lot more, so feel free to mention your “must have” extensions in the comments!

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Piotr Bach

Senior .NET Developer and Umbraco Master.

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