“Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools” available on the Visual Studio Gallery and free for everyone (VS 2010 Pro and above though). Think “Monster rollaway filled with cool power tools”

bharry's WebLog - Announcing the first Visual Studio Pro Power Tools!

“I’m VERY pleased to announce the latest addition to the Visual Studio Power Tools line-up – the Visual Studio Pro Power Tools.  Over the past few years, Power Tools have been such a successful way to deliver compelling value to customers quickly that more and more teams are adding it to their repertoire.  Today, we are releasing the first delivery for VS Pro customers.  These tools are focused on core developer productivity.  I think you will find some of them tremendously exciting!

To avoid barraging you with too many independent Power Tool delivery vehicles, we have standardized on the Visual Studio Gallery as the unifying way for delivering them.  Over time we’ll continue to improve the VS Gallery to make it an even more fantastic way to stay up to date.  In fact, check out the descriptions below and see that this Power Tools release is already helping with that by making it easy to find out about updates to extensions that you’ve already installed.

Of course, the other cool thing about all of this is that all of these tools just use standard VS extensibility mechanisms.  You could build cool stuff like this too if you want to.

As with other Power Tools, these Power Tools are available free of additional charge to users of Visual Studio 2010.

Add Reference Dialog

There’s a new Add Reference dialog that takes the place of the one that shipping in VS 2010 that is way faster and provides simple searching.  From the Solution Explorer or Navigator, simply right click on the References node, select Add Reference…

…

…”

Jason Zander's WebLog - Announcing: VS2010 Productivity Power Tools and Modeling Feature Packs

“I just completed the Developer Foundational Session (mouthful) at TechEd New Orleans where we announced the immediate availability of two great new projects for VS2010:  the Productivity Power Tools and Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack.

Product Release Types

Before going into the details of the new releases, I want to explain more about the types of releases you can expect us to provide:

Product Releases
Our primary distribution vehicle is normal product releases such as Visual Studio 2010 itself.  These releases are fully tested, localized into multiple languages, and fully supported. …

Power Tools
These are releases we provide periodically that work on top of a released version of the product (e.g. we don’t modify the product core but rather use extensibility points).  While these releases are done by our engineering team, they are meant to try out new ideas or answer common requests quickly.  We may or may not incorporate the ideas permanently into a future version of the product.  …

Feature Packs
Feature Packs are a new concept we are introducing with VS2010.  Like Power Tools these releases are designed to run on top of the existing core bits (no modifications allowed) using extensibility.  Unlike Power Tools, Feature Packs are ideas we fully intend to incorporate into the core product in the future (consider it a head start on v-next). …

Samples
Finally we have the venerable sample (starter kits, etc).  These are intended to demonstrate features and may be of varying levels of quality or completeness.

Productivity Power Tools

With VS2010 we made a significant number of platform investments including the new WPF based editor, DGML, UML diagrams, and TFS extensibility.  We took advantage of a lot of these features for building out the final product. But it has always been my expectation that this investment really pays off as we are able to do a full job building on this core platform.  The Productivity Power Tools represent the first example of doing that by our team (our partners have done great work as well, check out VS Gallery for more).

The Productivity Power Tools collect a bunch of very straightforward and very useful features that help you in your every day life in Visual Studio.  The features concentrate on editing, navigation, and other common tasks you use while constructing your code.

…

…”

Visual Studio Gallery - Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools

“Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools

A set of extensions to Visual Studio Professional (and above) which improves developer productivity.

…

Wow…

I dig that the Add References dialog can be replaced at all, let alone with one like this. Given the amount of things in this release (and everything else happening today), it’s taking me a bit to digest it all…