
Visual Studio 2015 Extensions You Might Find Useful - douche
http://www.hamidmosalla.com/2016/09/12-Visual-Studio-2015-Extensions-You-Might-Find-Useful.html
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Stratoscope
Here are a few more that I use:

EditorConfig - Reads your .editorconfig files and applies their settings.

Markdown Editor - Edit Markdown with live preview.

Smooth Scrolling - Use smooth scrolling instead of jumpy scrolling, nice for
two-finger touchpad scrolling. There are also two different extensions named
"Smooth Scroll" (no "ing") that do similar things. I've had one or another of
these work better depending on the machine.

Strip'em - Force consistent newlines when files are saved. (Note this is not
in the extension gallery, you have to get it from the developer's site.)

TabSanity - For projects that insist on spaces for indentation, makes the left
and right arrow keys jump a full indent level instead of one space.

Text Macros for Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015 - Adds some of the keyboard macro
support that went AWOL some years ago.

And of course things like ReSharper or Visual Assist, plus language specific
extensions like HLSL Tools, PowerShell Tools, Python Tools, etc.

~~~
retro64
>TabSanity - For projects that insist on spaces for indentation, makes the
left and right arrow keys jump a full indent level instead of one space.

Hold your control key down while hitting right/left arrow. This will jump to
the beginning or end of the next word (effectively skipping the tab/spaces).

Now you can remove an extension! :) 

~~~
Stratoscope
Thanks. I do use ctrl+left/right all the time, along with their friends
ctrl+shift+left/right. The Home key is also handy since it toggles between the
beginning of the line and the first non-whitespace character on the line.

I still like TabSanity, though. Perhaps it's because I use tabs in all my own
projects and I like the way the left-right keys move one indent at a time. So
having those keys work the same way with space indentation has a certain
comfort to it.

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LyalinDotCom
Great list! We've also been blogging about extensions to give folks visibility
into new ones to explore, here is one example:

New and Noteworthy Extensions for Visual Studio – April 2016:
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/05/02/new...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/05/02/new-
noteworthy-visual-studio-extensions-april-2016/)

You can find the other posts and related ones using this tag filter on our
official Visual Studio team blog:
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/tag/extensions...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/tag/extensions/)

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to3m
Since we're sharing, here are some good addons that I like:

\- [https://github.com/tom-seddon/VSScripts](https://github.com/tom-
seddon/VSScripts) (disclaimer: written by me - however I didn't write it
because I think it's useless!) - insert text by printing from command line
tools, and alter text by piping selection through a command line tool

\- [http://www.usysware.com/dpack/](http://www.usysware.com/dpack/) \- addons
that improve the code browsing experience a bit (I particularly like the
methods and file browsers)

\-
[https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1290e058-33da...](https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1290e058-33da-485f-9b75-1891abc947b3)
\- word-wraps comments for you. An absolute godsend if you want to write
meaningful comments without going nuts

\-
[https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1141bff-463f...](https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1141bff-463f-465f-9b6d-d29b7b503d7a)
\- makes the debugger auto-attach to child processes when launched by your
main process. Highly recommended if you work with multi-process stuff - the
out-of-the-box UX for debugging that sort of thing isn't great, but in my view
this pretty much fixes it

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FrancoDiaz
I have a ton of extensions for VS 2015. I'm getting worried though that they
all are collectively bogging down Visual Studio. Is there a way to profile
what is causing freezes in VS?

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daheza
As someone who uses visual studio at work everyday I often find it incredibly
slow and thats even without any extensions. I am curious if you use VS do you
use it on windows severs or are you running windows 10? Also as far as the
slowness often how large are you projects? Do you run your TFS work space
local or server?

~~~
douche
The only thing that it really chokes and dies on is if I try to open a mix of
C#, SQL, JS and HTML files at the same time. I'm not totally sure what it is
doing or analyzing, but the memory usage jumps up to somewhere north of 2GB
with a lot of disk thrashing, when I might have 200 kb of text files open.
JavaScript intellisense seems to be the most likely culprit, to the point that
I have gotten in the habit of doing all front-end editing work in WebStorm,
and reserving VS for the backend code, which is a much happier experience.

This is on Windows 10, with a solution of about 15-25 projects. At one point
it was close to 100K LOC, but that was before we went in with fire and sword
to remove some terrible, terrible amounts of redundancy, so it's considerably
less now.

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mentos
Visual Assist was helpful for Unreal Engine 4 programming as the default VS
code completion was insanely slow

~~~
nightski
May have to try Visual Assist again since ReSharper moved to this awful
licensing model and is getting increasingly slower with every release.

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DenisM
This might b a good place to ask - is there a way to browse c# source code by
traversing dependency graph instead of a list of files?

I feel that there has to be...

~~~
loco5niner
Perhaps Code Map is what you are looking for? [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/jj739835.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/jj739835.aspx)

(Requires Enterprise to create and make edits, Professional can open and make
minimal edits)

(actually this is the better link for mapping dependencies:
[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/dd409453.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/dd409453.aspx))

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iamcreasy
Anybody knows similar extensions/plugins like Viasfora for IntellijIDEA?

I'd love to have some scope highlighter when inside a nested if-else.(Java)

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qwertyuiop924
As an Emacs user, I'm looking to see anything I'd find useful here... nope.
The few useful ones have Emacs equivalents, and most of them wouldn't even
qualify as extesions: they're just snippets I'd drop in my .emacs file.

~~~
barpet
Well. Emacs is trying to be everything and is extremely powerful. VS on the
other hand is better in its own domain than Emacs.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
But what IS the VS domain? Is it just plain text editing? Because Emacs can
smash it at that. Is is programming? Because Emacs beats it in the general
case at that, too. Is it programming in a very specific language? This is
where it starts to win out, but I don't want to switch editors every time I
switch languages, and Emacs does all of that Good Enough. It even has semantic
autocomplete in some languages at this point. The only thing it's missing is
refactoring tools, which aren't as important when you're not writing Java.

~~~
moomin
Debugging. VS has a pretty amazing debugging experience.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Does it beat the Emacs debugging experience? We've got some pretty sweet
debugging integration.

~~~
jasode
MSVS has "edit & continue" for C# code. It also has backwards step debugging
with Intellitrace.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Jeez. That's actually quite impressive! I mean, well done.

