Earlier this week Jason Zander announced the availability of a new VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools release that includes a
bunch of great new VS 2010 extensions that provide a bunch of cool new
functionality for you to take advantage of.
You can download and install the release for free here. Some of the code editor improvements it
provides include:
1.
Entire Line Highlighting: Makes it easier to track cursor location
within the editor
2.
Entire Line Selection: Triple Clicking a line in the code editor now
selects the entire line (like with MS Word)
3.
Code Block Movement: Use Alt+Up/Down Arrow now moves selected code
blocks up/down in the editor
4.
Consistent Tabs vs. Spaces: Ensure consistent tab vs. space usage across
your projects
5.
Colorized Parameters: It is now easier to see/identify method parameters
6.
Column Guide: You can now add vertical column guidelines to help with
text alignment and sizes
7.
Align assignments: Makes it easier to line-up multiple variable
assignments within your code
8.
HTML Clipboard Support: Copy/paste code from VS into an HTML buffer
(useful for blogging!)
9.
Ctrl + Click Go to Definition: You can now hold down the Ctrl key and
click a type to go to its definition
It also includes several tab management improvements for
managing document tabs within the IDE:
1.
Show Close Button in Tab Well: Shows a close button in document well for
the active tab (like VS 2008 did)
2.
Colored Tabs: You can now select the color of each document tab by
project or by regex
3.
Pinned Tabs: Enables you to pin tabs to keep them always visible and
available
4.
Vertical Tabs: You can now show document tabs vertically to fit more
tabs than normal
5.
Remove Tabs by Usage Order: Better behavior when adding new tabs and one
needs to be hidden for space reasons
6.
Sort Tabs by Project: Tabs can be sorted by project they belong to,
keeping them grouped together
7.
Sort Tabs Alphabetically: Tabs can be sorted alphabetically
And last – but not least – it includes a new and improved
“Add Reference” dialog:
This new Add Reference dialog caches assembly information –
which means it loads within a second or two (note: the very first time it still
loads assembly data – but it then caches it and makes it fast afterwards). The
new Add Reference dialog also now includes searching support – making it easier
to find the assembly you are looking for.
You can read more about all of the above improvements in Jason’s blog post about the release.