The 15 Best, Must-Have Visual Studio Extensions for Developers

Visual Studio is Microsoft’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE). You can use it for the development of computer programs, websites, web applications, web services, and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses platforms such as Windows API, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, and Windows Store to develop software. Here is a list of 15 must-have Visual Studio extensions that are important for developers:

• Visual Studio Spell Checker
• CodeMaid
• VS Color Output
• Visual Studio IntelliCode
• Trailing Whitespace Visualizer
• Magical C# Debugging—OzCode
• ReSharper
• Glyphfriend
• SlowCheetah
• File Icons
• Image Optimizer
• File Nesting
• Roslynator
• NCrunch for Visual Studio
• SideWaffle Template Pack

Visual Studio Spell Checker

If you write comments, it is with the expectation that somebody will read them one day.  And it would be embarrassing if you misspelled words in those comments. This kind of situation can be handled by the Visual Studio Spell Checker extension. This checks the spelling of comments, strings, and plain text as you type or interact with a tool window. You can also customize it to perform spell-checking over an entire solution, a project, or selected items.

Visual Studio Spell Checker

CodeMaid

CodeMaid is a Visual Studio extension that has over a million downloads. This provides the ability to clean and simplify the code. Steve Cadwallader, the man behind CodeMaid, demonstrates code cleaning and reorganizing, visualizing and navigating through your code, comment formatting, and more in this video: https://youtu.be/M8iwCaw61Mo.

Cleanup Active Document using CodeMaid

VS Color Output

This is a must-install extension. It enables individuals in development to stop on their first mistake, saving numerous hours of work while working with large projects. VS Color Output changes the color of a line emitted to the output window based on the rules specified. The rules are made up of regular expressions. Rule map classifications, in turn, map colors.

Options in VSColorOutput

Visual Studio IntelliCode

Visual Studio IntelliCode is a collection of AI-assisted skills that enhance developers’ productivity with characteristics such as contextual IntelliSense, argument completion, code formatting, and style rule inference. IntelliCode increases a current builder’s workflow with machine-learning facilities that provide an understanding of code and its context. It is applicable for C #, C++ (in preview), JavaScript/TypeScript (in preview), and XAML code, and is expected to be updated in the future to support more languages. By default, both base models of C# and XAML are enabled. You must manually enable the languages in the preview, as per your need.

Trailing Whitespace Visualizer

The Trailing Whitespace Visualizer extension highlights and wipes any trailing whitespace in any Visual Studio editor on any line. By executing the Delete Horizontal White Space command contained in Edit-> Advanced or by using the shortcut key combination CTRL+K, Ctrl+\, you can easily delete all the trailing white space in a file.

Trailing whitespaces highlighted in the code

Magical C# Debugging—OzCode

OzCode is a Visual Studio Extension that cuts down debugging time and increases productivity by detecting and isolating bugs, making them easy to fix. OzCode makes C# debugging simple and efficient. Omer Raviv, the author, demonstrates many magical debugging features, including a LINQ debugging experience, which makes learning and debugging functional code easier, in the video: https://youtu.be/82jq5cvl67E.

ReSharper

ReSharper is a popular Microsoft Visual Studio developer productivity extension. It automates most of what you can automate in your coding routines. It discovers and corrects compiler mistakes, runtime errors, and redundancies right as you type, and proposes smart adjustments for them. ReSharper enables you to study software by visualizing file composition, category and design hierarchies, call and value chains, and project dependencies. It lets you immediately cross your entire solution and leap straight to the precise folder and line you’re searching for. It also decompiles library code if needed.

Options in ReSharper

Glyphfriend

Glyphfriend is a Visual Studio extension enhancing the existing Intellisense to display preview glyphs for many of the common glyph-based font libraries. Some of the libraries supported by Glyphfriend are Bootstrap Glyphicons, Entypo, Font Awesome, Foundation, Ionicons, Material Design, and Octicons.

SlowCheetah

The SlowCheetah package allows you to automatically transform your app.config (or any file) when you press F5 in Visual Studio. You can have different transformations based on the build configurations. This will easily enable you to have different app settings, connection strings, etc., for debug versus release. You can transform other files as well using SlowCheetah. When you have different projects with different configurations, the transformation from development to staging to production becomes unpleasant. I remember having app.config file with different commented configurations for each environment and struggling to comment and uncomment the right ones. Well, I’m happy those days are over after using SlowCheetah.

File Icons

File Icons is a fantastic extension that adds icons for files that are not recognized by the Solution Explorer.

Image Optimizer

To offer customers the greatest feasible experience, we all want our applications to load as quickly as possible. One of the measures to accomplish this is to ensure the optimization of the images we use. The Image Optimizer extension for Visual Studio is very simple to use and is very efficient in optimizing the images. It uses industry-standard tools to optimize any JPEG, PNG, and GIF, including animated GIFs. It can do both lossy and lossless optimization.

Optimizing image using Image Optimizer

File Nesting

The nesting of files in the Solution Explorer of the Visual Studio is available for a long time now. But still, the rules it follows is not agreed by all. That’s not a problem anymore because File Nesting now gives you complete control over file nesting in Solution Explorer. You can both automatically and manually nest and unnest the files based on their names. File naming rules can be defined to automatically nest the files. You can then apply these rules to any file, folder, or entire project.

Roslynator

Almost 400 analyzers, refactorings, and code fixes for C#, powered by the new Roslyn compiler, are bundled with Visual Studio. What’s not to like? Roslynator works closest to the ReSharper, but the biggest advantage is that it is free to use. 

NCrunch for Visual Studio

NCrunch is an automated, continuous parallel testing tool for Visual Studio .NET. It intelligently assumes responsibility for running automated tests so you don’t have to. It provides you an enormous quantity of helpful inline data about your tests (such as code coverage and performance metrics) in your IDE while you are working.

Options in NCrunch for running automated tests on a particular line

SideWaffle Template Pack

Let’s face it. The number of Visual Studio project templates available out of the box is pretty limited. SideWaffle fixes this with a lot of new projects and item templates.

Conclusion

I hope this blog enriched your knowledge of Visual Studio extensions and assisted in the problems faced by developers in their daily lives.

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Happy Coding!