PH's blog

Inspired by the excellent video on Channel9, I wanted to show you the very best Visual Studio plugins I use. Definitely a must-have if you use Subversion is AnkhSVN. Beeing rather difficult to use in earlier version now AnkhSVN is really reliable and the most usefull helper within Visual Studio.

Next tool on my list is doxygen together with GraphViz this helps a lot on documenting your sourcecode. And again there is a Visual Studio AddIn called KingsTools. It is a little outdated and not every feature of doxygen is being exposed by the UI. But if you just want to quickly run a documentation tool on your code this KingsTools will do the trick.

Third one will be the snippet designer available through Codeplex. Snippet Designer helps you to define and organize snippets. It comes with an easy to use UI. Just select a piece of code (method, classes etc.), right click and export as snippet. You can refactor all variables or method names. Really cool!

Again Codeplex! SourceCode Outliner Power toy provides a tree view on your code. It's only a small feature but I often wanted VS to have it built in. Additionally it highlights the code in the editor ifyou select a method in the treeview.

And last but not least CodeRush Express which provides lotsof features. You can read about them here (sorry German only) and download it directly from CodeRush Xpress C#. I'm currently testing this one and already very pleased with it.

And again, please take a look at this PDC video: Microsoft Visual C# IDE: Tips and Tricks I promise, you will see at least one shortcut, you didn't know yet. (My tipp: CTRL+.)

[UPDATE] KingsTools: Please note, that there are updated Sources for VS2008 in the Comment Section of the Codeproject Article. Please read  this comment

You can download the sources directly through http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/kpetters/KingsTools_src_VS2008.zip but note that's not me who's hosting the files. All the credits go to Green Chilie! Thanks!

While writing about WPF I am always searching for new input. One of the most interesing things definitely is CodeProject: An Article on sorting ItemsControl. The Content of the Article resambles as follows:

• How to create a scrollable design area
• Designing a custom panel
• How to use Adorners in a neat way
• How to sort a ItemsControl using a CollectionView

Another interesting WPF Toolkit release can be found on Codeplex. The WPF Toolkit includes a DataGrid control, a calendar control and some other interesting things. As they say there will be more features in later realeases. Always the latest news on WPF can be found on the msdn WPF SDK blog. And finally I ran into Ivo Manolov's blog where I found the WPF Application Quality Guide which will be my lecture for today's evening. Hope this helps someone else.