New and Noteworthy Extensions for Visual Studio – March 2016

Visual Studio Blog

It was great to see the excitement around last month’s post and I heard from many of you that you have discovered some new extensions. March has been another great month for the Visual Studio ecosystem. We added over 100 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:

Also if you missed our earlier post, we recently open sourced the Productivity Power Tools. Besides being a great tool for developers, they make great samples for real world extensions. So head over to the repo and take a look.

Comment Remover by Mads Kristensen

Download Comment Remover from the Visual Studio Gallery

Last time, I showed you an extension that helped you with your xml comments. If you are not a friend of extensive comments, I got something different this time. An extension to remove all comments from your code. It does not only support removing comments from C# files, but also json files. Like almost all of Mad’s extensions, the source is available on GitHub.

Before Comment Remover After Comment Remover

Smooth Scroll by Lkytal

Download Smooth Scroll from the Visual Studio Gallery

This is great example of a nice and simple extension. It enables smooth scrolling in the editor. Who would have thought that this is something you can improve through an extension? No screenshot here. You got to try it out and feel it yourself :).

AsmDude by H.J. Lebbink

Download AsmDude from the Visual Studio Gallery

I don’t claim to regularly look at assembly code, or even write it myself, however I love this little project to add assembly (ASM) syntax support to Visual Studio. The project is only one month old, but is being updated regularly with new features. You can see the full progress on the GitHub repo. Maybe this is even something you are interested in contributing to, if you are passionate about assembly.

ASM Dude

Microsoft Band Tile Designer Preview

Download Microsoft Band Tile Designer Preview from the Visual Studio Gallery

This will come in handy, if you are a Microsoft Band developer. The extension provides an item template that makes it easy to add a Band tile to your app. Once you add the template, you can use the included designer and toolbox items to put together your tileby enabling selections , icons, and button presses.

Microsoft Band Tile Designer Preview

Top 10 Popular Extensions from March 2016

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

  1. TypeScript 1.8.4 for Visual Studio 2015
  2. DNX Angular2 Example project
  3. Microsoft Band Tile Designer Preview
  4. DNX Console Application
  5. Qlik Analytics for Visual Studio
  6. Snippet Essentials
  7. AsmDude
  8. C# Mapping & Mapper Class Generator
  9. CodeBeautifier
  10. AzureIonic To-Do List Sample App

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, we just launched a new site with 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.

0 comments

Discussion is closed.

Feedback usabilla icon