In April the community added another 100 new Visual Studio extensions to the Visual Studio Gallery. To help you enjoy this creativity from the community, every month or two I’ll be introducing some of the new extensions that caught my eye. Here are the highlights for this month:

• Open in Notepad++ (Good old Notepad++)
• File Differ (Compare two files)
• And Pizza For All (Did somebody say Pizza?!)
• Visual C++ For Linux Development

Open in Notepad++ by Calvin A. Allen

Download Open in Notepad++ from the Visual Studio Gallery

This extension adds an option to open a file in Notepad++ to the right-click menu of Solution Explorer. We have previously seen similar extensions like Open in Sublime and Open in Visual Studio Code. Calvin based this extension on the open source code of the other two and added this helpful feature for all users of Notepad++.

File Differ by Mads Kristensen

Download File Differ from the Visual Studio Gallery

At last month’s //build conference, Mads held a session on building Visual Studio extensions. During the session he created this helpful extension to compare two files in your project. It took him less than one hour to write the code, publish it to GitHub and integrate it into continuous integration – all live on stage. You can catch the recording of the session over at Channel 9.

And Pizza For All by Daniel Meixner

Download And Pizza For All from the Visual Studio Gallery

This extension allows you to order Pizza straight from within Visual Studio. Yum! More seriously though, this is a great example of how easy it is to integrate a website into Visual Studio. The source of the extension is available on GitHub and it’s a great starting point if you want to integrate a web application into Visual Studio.

Visual C++ For Linux Development

Download Visual C++ For Linux Development from the Visual Studio Gallery

The Visual C++ extension for Linux Development allows you to write C++ code for Linux right in Visual Studio. You can create a new project, remote compile, and debug right from within Visual Studio.

Top 10 Popular Extensions from April 2016

As I mentioned in the beginning, we added a great number of new extensions in April. Out of the new ones added, here are the 10 most popular ones — give them a try!

1. Visual C++ for Linux Development
2. Xamarin Forms Templates
3. Solidity
4. File Differ
5. Learn the Shortcut
6. Web Accessibility Checker
7. Grunt Snippet Pack
8. Agent SVN
9. vsXen
10. Ninja Coder For MvvmCross and Xamarin Forms

Build your own

These few examples of simple integrations show a wide range of what you can build through Visual Studio’s extensibility framework. If that piqued your interest, our Integrate site has some great tutorials and videos on how to get started with Visual Studio extensions: VisualStudio.com/integrate. Take a look and let me know how it goes. I’m also hanging out in our extendvs Gitter chat as @bertique. Come on by and give me a shout.

Michael Dick, Senior Program Manager, Visual Studio @midi2dot0 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.