Monday, July 19, 2010

The Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools just got better (with yesterday’s update). Now it’s Cool x 2!

The Visual Studio Blog - New Version of the Productivity Power Tools is Available!

“I am pleased to announce that we have an updated version of the Productivity Power Tools. With this release, we've introduced 4 brand new extensions and we've fixed many of the bugs that were reported in the previous version. If you have the Productivity Power Tools installed already, you will get a notification that a new version is available the next time you restart Visual Studio. Otherwise, you can visit our Visual Studio Gallery page here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/d0d33361-18e2-46c0-8ff2-4adea1e34fef

Tools Options Support

The number one feature request by far has been the ability to turn off the individual extensions in the Productivity Power Tools.  In this release, we’ve added an extension which adds a category to Tools Options which allows you to toggle the extensions on/off and provides a single place to find the options for a particular extension.

Solution Navigator

Solution Navigator is a new tool window that acts like an enhanced Solution Explorer.  With it, you can:

  • Expand code files to navigate to its classes, expand classes to navigate to their members, and so on (C# and VB only)
  • Search your solution, all the way down to class members
  • Filter your solution or projects to see just opened files, unsaved files, and so on
  • View related information about classes and members (such as references or callers/callees for C#)
  • Preview images by hovering over them, or preview rich information by hovering over code items

In other words, it merges functionality from Solution Explorer, Class View, Object Browser, Call Hierarchy, Navigate To, and Find Symbol References all into one tool window!

Quick Access

Quick Access is a new tool window that allows users to search for and execute common tasks within the Visual Studio IDE.  Not sure where a particular menu command is located?  Want a quick way to create a new Silverlight project? By using Quick Access, you can efficiently find and execute common VS operations without taking your hands off the keyboard.  Quick Access allows users to:

image…”

Awesome…

 

Related Past Post XRef:
“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”

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