The Visual Studio Gallery is the best place to find tools, controls, and templates to help make your life as a developer easier and more productive. Every so often, I publish my personal list of favorite extensions. This is something I started back when Visual Studio 2010 was first released. A lot has changed since then. I have already published my favorites list for Visual Studio 2013 several times. As new extensions are released, old ones updated or removed, the list does change a bit from time to time. This time, I’m going to separate the list into two sections, those extensions I feel are “must haves” and those I feel are “really nice to have”.
The “Must Haves”
These extensions are almost always language/platform agnostic and just make Visual Studio better and/or easier to work in. A lot of these, but not all, are from Microsoft, Microsoft DevLabs, or Microsoft employees (current and former).
- Add Empty File
- AutoHistory (Microsoft DevLabs)
- Bing Developer Assistant Beta (Microsoft)
- ClipboardHistory
- Code Metrics Viewer 2013
- Commentator
- EditorConfig
- File Nesting
- ItalicComments
- License Header Manager
- Microsoft CodeLens Code Health Indicator (Microsoft DevLabs)
- Move Type To File
- NuGet Package Manager for Visual Studio 2013 (Microsoft)
- Pretty Paste
- Productivity Power Tools 2013 (Microsoft)
- Visual Studio Spell Checker
- Visual Studio Tools for Git (Microsoft)
- Vitevic Move To New File Refactoring
- VSCommands for Visual Studio 2013
- Trailing Whitespace Visualizer
The “Really Nice to Haves”
These extensions generally fall into language specific or technology specific extensions. That really means they may only b useful to you at certain times.
- Application Insights for Visual Studio (Microsoft)
- NUnit Test Adapter
- Shared Project Reference Manager
- SHFB (This is only available from the CodePlex site.)
- SideWaffle Template Pack
- Snippetizer (Microsoft)
- Web Essentials 2013 for Update 3
- XAML Regions
- .NET Portability Analyzer (Microsoft)
- XAML Formatter