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Pimp your IDE!

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Since I posted my IDE Tips and Tricks blog entry, I have been getting a lot of emails from customers. They all tell me 2 things:

1. They love the article (this is good, I am happy)
2. Part of the code listing for generating the list of keyboard shortcuts is missing (this is bad, and I am not happy)

The missing code listing was caused by an error when the article was converted into MSDN format. I temporarily worked around it by posting the complete code listing in one of the comments for that blog entry. After working through multiple hurdles, I finally got the listing fixed, so hopefully customers will only tell me #1 now :)

Since our customers love to make Visual Studio do more for them, I want to bring your attention to the IDE Enhancements pack today. Specifically, I want to highlight the Source Code Outliner and the VC++ Snippet.

The Source Code Outliner gives you a tree view of your source file's code elements.This is very useful when you are navigating your way around a large source file. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so you can see a screen shot below.

Source Code Outliner

Another thing that's worth pointing out is that we have actually made this into a shared source project on CodePlex. So you are free to download and tweak the source however you want. Of course, it would be great if you can contribute features back into the project!

The second great enhancements you can add is the VC++ Snippet. VS2005 introduced the Code Snippet feature, but it was only available for C# and VB developers. Fear not! You can install VC++ Snippet today and have it work immediately.

VC Snippet

Both of the above features are available via the IDE Enhancements download. Try it out and let me know what you think!

There are a lot more packages and add-ins that you can install to make your Visual Studio experience better. They come from both Microsoft and third-parties. To discover more of these, you can visit the PowerToys page and search on CodePlex for offerings from the community. My favorite tags to use on CodePlex to find these projects are "Visual Studio 2005", "VS2005", "IDE Enhancements", "add-ins", and "power toys".