My Favourite Visual Studio Extensions

14 Oct 2014 by Nigel Sampson

A week or so ago I came across a post from Scott Dorman on his favuorite Visual Studio extensions and thought I’d create mine.

Initially I thought it would be a rather long list, but it turns out the out of the box experience is pretty good for me with a few changes.

Here’s my list (in no particular order).

Reference Extension SDK Locally

This was built by Pete Goodman while at [Marker Metro(http://www.markermetro.com/), it takes a global reference to a Visual Studio SDK and turns into a local reference.

It solves a number of problems:

• Don’t have a laundry list of SDK’s to install to build the project for new developers.
• Eases the pain on the build server not requiring SDK’s to be installed.
• Allows different projects to reference different versions of the SDK.

Nuget

The go to package manage for .net, can’t say much more than that.

Xaml Spy

Great tool for finding out why your xaml layouts aren’t pixel perfect which I think is one of the things that makes good apps into great apps.

Resharper

This is the extension I can’t live without, it’s the one I install directly after Visual Studio and feel absolutely useless without it.