Araye Development Tools | Visual Studio Add-ins

List of useful and time saving tools for Visual Studio developers

Incomplete List

Our goal is to use community power to create and maintain list of usefull tools for developers . Original idea from Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. Please fork & help us make this list better

  • Productivity Power Tools - Two dozen cool new enhancements to Visual Studio. The best features get into the next version of VS. Check out PeekHelp, TimeStampMargin, RecentlyClosedTabs, and LOTS more.
  • Electric Plum iPhone Mobile Simulator - A nice little iOS browsing experience emulator. Saves me time when writing jQuery Mobile sites.
  • Web Essentials - Add Browser Link features, improved CSS editing, color preview, font preview and lots more to Visual Studio with this lightweight and actively developed “playground” extension. Yes, I mentioned it twice.
  • CodeMaid - Deep and powerful open source code cleanup tool that supports not just C# and VB, but also F#, XAML, CSS and much more!
  • OzCode - Formerly BugAid, OzCode takes the concept of a Debug Visualizer to the next level. Visualize forloops and their future, compare expressions, dig deep and compare arrays and much more. Free while in Beta.
  • NuGet Package Manager - NuGet integrates into the References node of the Solution Explorer, enables Package Management and brings PowerShell directy into to Visual Studio.
  • VsVim - Obsessed with the Vim editor but also like Visual Studio? Why not like them both? It’s also open source.
  • StyleCop - StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules. It can be run from inside of Visual Studio or integrated into an MSBuild project. Totally useful by yourself or with a team.
    • Use StyleCop.MSBuild to integrate StyleCop into your system’s build with NuGet!
  • Code Digger (based on Pex) - Amazing Visual Studio addin that finds edge cases in your code that ordinary unit testing never can.
  • WiX Toolset - Creating setup projects got harder with VS2013 as deployment projects were removed. Consider the Free and Open Source WiX Toolset, recently updated to support 2013! Extremely mature and trusted.
  • Atomineer - The last word in code documentation generation, this tool lets you take unruly code comments across 7 languages and lets you turn it into Qt, JavaDoc, Doxygen, and Documentation XML.