Steve Fenton

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Wednesday, 25th January 2012

Although Visual Studio 2011 is probably just around the corner and you never know what amazing additions will have been made, I thought I'd share a small list of essential plugins for Visual Studio that I am currently using to make Visual Studio 2010 even more awesome.

Resharper by JetBrains

Always at the top of my list with built-in refactorings and acting like a silent but effective pair-programmer 24 hours a day.

NuGet Package Manager by Microsoft / The Community

Don't bother downloading third party stuff to use in your project. Just use NuGet to get your hands on it. Not only gets the latest version of the thing you need, but also adds any required configuration etc.

Indent Guides by Steve Dower

Indents help, but indent guides help a lot. Really good visual code organisation for Visual Studio.

Web Standards Update by Microsoft

You are using HTML5 and CSS3 right? Get the web standards update and get Visual Studio to help you validate your pages.

NCrunch by Remco Software Ltd

I've saved the best for the end. This is in beta at the moment, but it is awesome. NCrunch constantly runs all your unit tests in the background and shouts when you wreck them. It is clever enough to run the tests affected by your changes and it also visualises code coverage in the code file. Totally radical and utterly awesome.