One of the greatest strengths of Visual Studio is the vibrancy of the partner ecosystem that surrounds it. There are thousands of extensions available for Visual Studio that enhance the editor experience, support new languages, add time-saving components to your toolbox, and integrate with other developer services. In the last year alone, over 1,000 free and paid extensions have been added to the Gallery, and of those we wanted to highlight a few of our favorites and encourage you to try them out for yourself!
- Alive (live coding for C#)
- Visual Commander (automate repetitive tasks)
- OzCode (debugger enhancements)
- IncrediBuild (doesn’t the name say it all?)
- Perfecto Lab for Visual Studio (run tests in PerfectMobile’s device cloud)
Alive
Alive brings live coding to Visual Studio. As you write C# code, the Alive extension runs it and displays immediate results directly in the editor. This shows you what your code is doing without taking the time to run your application in the debugger.
Download the Alive extension from the Visual Studio Gallery and enjoy a 30 day preview.
Visual Commander
Do a lot of your tasks feel repetitive? Automate them with the free Visual Commander extension. You can record keyboard commands for the Visual Studio editor as a macro and play them back, or reuse existing macros from earlier versions of Visual Studio.
Download Visual Commander from the Visual Studio Gallery.
OzCode
OzCode improves the Visual Studio debugger experience with many useful features. For example, it color-codes if statements and highlights variable assignments to visualize what your code is doing while you step through each statement. OzCode also adds details about each exception and lets you easily navigate to it, and offers much more such as a heads-up display, enhanced breakpoints, a historical view of code execution, Magic Glance, and just too much to list here. Check it out for yourself!
Download OzCode from the Visual Studio Gallery for a 30 day trial.
IncrediBuild
IncrediBuild accelerates your development by optimizing your tool chain, including make and build tools such as MSBuild, development tools such as Team Foundation Server, unit and static code analysis tools such as MSTest, VSTest, and FXCop, game development such as Xbox, as well as Azure and other cloud services and Visual Studio Online. For a more complete recap, see last November’s post on this blog, Improving your build times with IncrediBuild and Visual Studio 2015.
Download IncrediBuild from the Visual Studio Gallery for a 30 day trial
Perfecto Lab for Visual Studio
As a mobile developer you know about the challenges of making sure your app works on the vast number of different hardware and OS configurations in the market. This is where the Perfecto Lab integration will come in very handy! With the Perfecto extension you can run tests in the Perfecto device cloud straight out of Visual Studio and get feedback on how your app behaves on real hardware.
Get started with Perfecto Lab for Visual Studio from the Visual Studio Gallery. The extension requires an account with Perfecto Mobile (free trial of 50 hours/month for 3 months).
We want to hear from you
We hope you will find this selection of Visual Studio extensions useful, and you can discover many more in the Visual Studio Gallery. Let me know your favorites in the comments, too! And if you have general feedback about Visual Studio extensibility, take a look at Visual Studio Extensibility on UserVoice.
Michael Dick, Program Manager, Visual Studio Michael Dick is a Program Manager working on the Visual Studio team. Before joining Microsoft, Michael worked at a variety of tech companies and is passionate about developer tools. He is currently focusing on the ecosystem and extensibility experience for Visual Studio. |
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