Useful extensions in Visual Studio

Visual Studio is an Integrated Development Environment(IDE) developed by Microsoft where you can code,debug and run Web, Mobile or Gaming applications. According to Wikipedia, Visual Studio supports around 36 programming languages and the debugger will support all these programming languages.

The latest version of Visual Studio is 2019(16.4.1). There’s an add-on feature called Extensions in Visual Studio where it makes Visual Studio more powerful. In our previous blog we have seen some useful extension in VS Code.

In this blog, we are going to see some useful extensions that can be used in Visual Studio.

Visual Studio Extensions

ReSharper

ReSharper is one of the legendary .NET Productivity tool which will be very useful to refactor your code, run unit tests and you can write quality code faster.

The latest version of ReSharper is 2019.3. And also it has lot of options to explore and it will definitely increase your productivity.

Marketplace link => https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JetBrains.ReSharper

IntelliCode

IntelliCode provides you an AI-assisted capabilities like contextual intelliSense, argument completion, code formatting and style rule inference. Basically you can train this intelliCode based upon your coding style and it will give your proper suggestions based upon your style.

You can also share this trained model to your colleagues and they can make use of this model if they are part of the same team.

Marketplace Link => https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualStudioExptTeam.VSIntelliCode

Live Share

It is one of the coolest extension in Visual Studio where you can have an collaborative session to code, debug and run your application. And also there’s an call option available during Live Share, you can speak and make changes accordingly.

And the main important advantage of using this extension is you can share your workspace irrespective of the platform i.e. you can share Visual Studio workspace from MAC to Visual Studio which is installed in Windows.

Marketplace Link => https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliveshare.vsls-vs

Add New File

Add New File extension provides you an fastest and an easiest way to add a new file to your project. Sometimes, your machine will not have enough configuration to run Visual Studio and also it gets crashed if you right click and say Add New File.

Just install this extension and press Shift + F2 and you can add folders, files etc. I also have written an detailed blog on this extension.

Marketplace Link => https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MadsKristensen.AddNewFile

Roslynator

Roslynator is one of the coolest extension for the people who use C#. It provides you a collection of 500+analyzers, refactorings and fixes for C#. Recently they had released a version in 2019 which became more powerful than previous versions.

Marketplace Link => https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=josefpihrt.Roslynator2019

VSColorOutput

VSColorOutput extension is used for changing the color of a line emitted to to the output window based on a specific rules. The default patterns will color build errors in red, warnings in yellow/gold and successful build messages in green

It will just improve the look and feel of Visual Studio.

Marketplace Link => https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MikeWard-AnnArbor.VSColorOutput

GlyphFriend

If you are front-end developer using Visual Studio then this extension will be very useful. Basically it can be installed to enhance the existing intellisense to display preview glyphs for many of the commonly used glyph libraries like Font-Awesome, Line-Awesome etc.

Marketplace Link => https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RionWilliams.Glyphfriend2017

ViasFora

The ViasFora extension adds many useful features for code C#, C/C++, JS, VB, F#, SQL, TypeScript, Python, PowerShell, R, JSON, Fortran. It provides you an great insight of your coding which will increase your productivity.

And also you can view the if braces or any other braces clearly and the keyword highlighting will be good.

Marketplace Link => https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TomasRestrepo.Viasfora

Conclusion

Visual Studio is evolving and it almost has all the comfortable features for development. You rarely need an extension to solve your purpose in Visual Studio because it has all the features that you want. But these are some of the extension which I came across to solve my problems.

There are around 9681 extensions in Visual Studio and these are my favorites. If you came across any other interesting extensions, please mention in the comments.

In our next blog, we will see how we can increase our .NET productivity using Visual Studio 2019.

Happy Coding!

Cheers! 🙂