Visual Studio Toolbox: Productivity Power Tools 2017

  • Article

In this episode, I am joined by Justin Clareburt, who shows off the Visual Studio 2017 version of the Productivity Power Tools, a collection of 15 extensions that provide additional features for the Visual Studio IDE. Justin covers:

  • Productivity Power Tools installation
  • Align Assignments: Aligns assignment statements by typing Ctrl+Alt+] 
  • Copy As Html: Provides support for the HTML Clipboard format when cutting for copying code from the editor
  • Ctrl+Click GoTo Definition: Enables clickable hyperlinks to symbols in source code in your code by holding down the Ctrl key when hovering with the mouse
  • Custom Document Well: Allows users to change the behavior of their document tabs 
  • Double-Click Maximize: Maximize any docked window by double-clicking its title bar and restore/dock by double-clicking again 
  • Editor Guidelines: Draws a vertical line in the code editor to remind developers that their full line of code or comments may not fit one a single screen 
  • Fix Mixed Tabs: Helps to manage the whitespace inside your document and assists in keeping consistency in the use of tabs and spaces 
  • Match Margin: Highlights all the textual matches of token at the caret location in the Editor 
  • Middle-Click Scroll: Enables you to press down on your scroll wheel and move the mouse to quickly scroll through your document 
  • Peek Help: Brings up the F1 Help content inline in the editor 
  • Power Commands for Visual Studio: A set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio IDE, including Remove and Sort Usings, Copy Path and Open Command Prompt 
  • Quick Launch Tasks: Provides easy access to commonly used options (EG: toggling line numbers) as well as popular functionality (EG: collapsing/expanding regions)   
  • Shrink Empty Lines: Shrinks lines that contain neither letters nor numbers by 25% vertically, allowing more lines to be displayed in the editor 
  • Solution Error Visualizer: Adds error, warning, and message squiggles to Solution Explorer 
  • Time Stamp Margin: Adds the timestamp information to the Output Window in Debug mode