Brian's Blog

items I see across my tribes

Power Tools for VS2010

October 01
by briancarter 1. October 2010 06:32

Nice extension for VS2010 that includes a bunch of new extensions that provide advanced functionality for you to take advantage of.

You can download and install the release for free here.  Some of the code editor improvements it provides include:

  • Entire Line Highlighting: Makes it easier to track cursor location within the editor
  • Entire Line Selection: Triple Clicking a line in the code editor now selects the entire line (like with MS Word)
  • Code Block Movement: Use Alt+Up/Down Arrow now moves selected code blocks up/down in the editor
  • Consistent Tabs vs. Spaces: Ensure consistent tab vs. space usage across your projects
  • Colorized Parameters: It is now easier to see/identify method parameters
  • Column Guide: You can now add vertical column guidelines to help with text alignment and sizes
  • Align assignments: Makes it easier to line-up multiple variable assignments within your code
  • HTML Clipboard Support: Copy/paste code from VS into an HTML buffer (useful for blogging!)
  • Ctrl + Click Go to Definition: You can now hold down the Ctrl key and click a type to go to its definition

It also includes several tab management improvements for managing document tabs within the IDE:

  • Show Close Button in Tab Well: Shows a close button in document well for the active tab (like VS 2008 did)
  • Colored Tabs: You can now select the color of each document tab by project or by regex
  • Pinned Tabs: Enables you to pin tabs to keep them always visible and available
  • Vertical Tabs: You can now show document tabs vertically to fit more tabs than normal
  • Remove Tabs by Usage Order: Better behavior when adding new tabs and one needs to be hidden for space reasons
  • Sort Tabs by Project: Tabs can be sorted by project they belong to, keeping them grouped together
  • Sort Tabs Alphabetically: Tabs can be sorted alphabetically

A new and improved “add reference” dialog is included.  Better load times!

Mirror download:

ProPowerTools.vsix (980.24 kb)

Categories: Development


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