Updated Productivity Power Tools Now Available

Last month we announced the Productivity Power Tools at TechEd in New Orleans.  The next version of those tools are now available here.  This updated version provides fixes and changes based on your feedback (thanks!) including the ability to turn individual features on/off.  Sean has a great blog post on the Visual Studio team blog outlining the new features. 

There is a lot to explore in the new release.  Two of my new favorites are the Solution Navigator and Quick Access.

Solution Navigator

Solution Navigator gives you an aggregated of the Solution Explorer, Class View, Object Browser, Call Hierarchy, Navigate To, and Find Symbol References in one window.  Here’s an example from my Windows Phone 7 application looking for everything related to persisting settings between runs (new sample post coming up on that one):

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Quick Access

Visual Studio has literally thousands of menus and options available to you and it can be daunting trying to figure out where everything is.  We’ve started to place some of the most obvious ones on the start page (connect to TFS, Open a project) and related areas.  Quick Access now gives you an easy way to search the product by hitting Ctrl+3:

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Summary

We built a lot of platform support into VS2010 including the new WPF editor, DGML, etc.  You should expect us to continue adding new value like these Power Tools going forward.  We’d really like your feedback as we plan out the next version of Visual Studio.  Which of the new tools would you like to see permanently built into VS?  Are there new areas we should be adding going forward?  Thanks in advance for your feedback!