valerio.net

While Visual Studio 2008 is a fantastic development environment in its own light, it’s also possible to install add-ins that further enhance its capabilities. I’ve been using a number of freely-available add-ins for the last few years (staring with Visual Studio 2005) and figured I’d share my discoveries in hopes that the list would be useful.

Currently-installed Visual Studio 2008 Add-ins:

• GhostDoc – http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc/
• TestDriven.NET – http://www.testdriven.net/
• WiX (Windows Installer XML) 3.0 – http://wix.sourceforge.net/
• F# – http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/fsharp.aspx

GhostDoc is a fantastic tool that makes inserting XML documentation tags into your code a piece of cake. You can right-click on a method, and GhostDoc will insert a summary tag, param tags for each method parameter, etc. The only thing you need to do is fill in the descriptions. GhostDoc usually guesses at what things mean, oftentimes leaving slightly funny results.

TestDriven.NET adds functionality to Visual Studio to seamlessly interface with unit testing frameworks such as NUnit and MbUnit. Running your unit tests is as simple as right-clicking on your project and selecting Test As -> Nunit.

Furthermore, installing TestDriven.NET also installs the personal edition of NCover and NCoverExplorer. As if running your unit tests wasn’t enough, now you can run NCover to discover exactly how much of your code was actually tested, and use NCoverExplorer to visually see which parts of your code are well-tested, and which ones need more test cases to ensure full coverage. These two tools make a very powerful combination.

WiX, which stands for Windows Installer XML, lets you easily build installers for your applications. I’ve used it in the past to package my programs into MSI install files for easy distribution. The great thing here is that the definition for the installer is specified in XML, which easily checks into my Subversion source control system (and diffs easily). You can make MSI installers with or without graphical interfaces.

F# is still a “research compiler”, but is well on its way to becoming fully productized. It adds an “F# Interactive” console window, which allows you to directly work with your code in much the same way as you would use MATLAB. F# also lets you write scripts that execute in the F# interactive window. Since no compilation is necessary, this way of programming and testing things can be very productive.

Also of note is the new Visual Studio Gallery site where you can search many different Visual Studio add-ins.  Odds are you’ll find something useful there that can increase your productivity.

There are a few other open-source/free development standalone tools that I use on a daily basis, but I’ll save that list for another post.

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