10 Essential Tools For Visual Studio.NET IDE Add-Ins!(VS 2005)

After reading the article, I can understand now why Visual Studio 2005 is such a great developer IDE, it isn't only about simplicity when coding, the complexity of features, it is also that extensibility which makes me like about it so much. The following 10 add-ins for the visual studio 2005 IDE can be very useful one way or another and I am just glade that there are even more fun and cool tools to work with!

Last year I wrote an article called ".NET Tools: Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now" that highlighted 10 freely available tools for the Microsoft .NET Framework. This year I am again creating a list of must-have tools, but this time I'm focusing on Visual Studio add-ins as opposed to standalone tools. Visual Studio provides a rich extensibility model that developers at Microsoft and in the community have taken advantage of to provide a host of quality add-ins. Some add-ins contribute significant how-did-I-live-without-this functionality, while others just help you automate that small redundant task you constantly find yourself performing.

In this article, I introduce you to some of the best Visual Studio add-ins available today that can be downloaded for free. I walk through using each of the add-ins, but because I am covering so many I only have room to introduce you to the basic functionality. Each of these add-ins works with Visual Studio .NET 2003 and most of them already have versions available for Visual Studio 2005. If a Visual Studio 2005 version is not available as of the time of this writing, it should be shortly.

Check 10 essential tools for VS 2005 add-ins