Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010
The Productivity Power Tools Extension for Visual Studio (VS) 2010 (for VS versions Professional and up) provides a number of excellent developer tools that can improve your efficiency developing software. I will review some of the main features and other tips and tricks of this extension to Visual Studio 2010 here.
Visual Studio is a robust editor with many excellent tools, windows, and features available for use right out of the box, but it can sometimes be challenging to find where something is located. Or to remember what the keyboard command is to show a window. With the Productivity Power Tools’ Quick Access tool (under the View menu), you can more easily find what you are looking for, and watch the results filter as you type. From the Quick Access window results, you can just select the link or note the keyboard command.
Another great feature in the Power Tools is the Solution Navigator. If you are not using ReSharper (which I admit I have grown to depend on), this can be an excellent way to quickly find files in your solution. The ability to fix the mixing of tabs and spaces within the source code alone is worth using this tool; it can be very handy for those of us who are meticulous about keeping clean looking source code.
The most useful feature I have found with the Power Tools is the Tab Well UI. Included is the ability to pin and sort open document tabs, apply color coding to tabs by project, and change the display of tabs in many ways, as you can see in the Document Tab Well options in Visual Studio:
With all of these great features does come one serious drawback; with the color coding of tabs in the Tab Well, it can become very difficult (and annoying) to find the currently selected tab. Applying this registry edit will restore the default coloring of the currently active tab in Visual Studio:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\DialogPage\Microsoft.DocWellBehavior.ColorGeneralOptions] "UseCustomColorForSelected"="False"
To install these Power Tools, just select Tools > Extension Manager in Visual Studio, and search for Productivity Power Tools.
I hope you will find these Power Tools improve your development efficiency in Visual Studio.
