During my work, I spend the most time with Visual Studio. Now because of VSCode, Visual Studio is getting little more free time. There was a time when I just thought that I couldn’t be productive without ReSharper for Visual Studio. But those times changed since Visual Studio is getting better with every new release. The number of extensions in the marketplace also helps. The following are my favorite tools and extensions for Visual Studio 2022.
Some of the below items are extension packs, which contain several extensions.
Free Tools
CodeMaid VS2022
CodeMaid VS2022 is an open source Visual Studio extension to cleanup and simplify our C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript coding.
EF Core Power Tools
EF Core Power Tools adds useful design-time DbContext features to the Visual Studio Solution Explorer context menu.
Productivity Power Tools 2022
Productivity Power Tools 2022 installs the individual extensions of Productivity Power Tools 2022
This is an extension pack installer will install each of the individual components of Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2022.
The following components will be installed:
- Align Assignments 2022
- Double-Click Maximize 2022
- Copy As Html 2022
- Fix Mixed Tabs 2022
- Match Margin 2022
- Middle-Click Scroll 2022
- Peek Help 2022
- Shrink Empty Lines 2022
- Solution Error Visualizer 2022
- Time Stamp Margin 2022
Tweaks 2022
Tweaks 2022 contains collection of minor fixes and tweaks for Visual Studio to reduce the paper cuts and make you a happier developer.
WakaTime (For VS2022 Preview)
WakaTime does metrics, insights, and time tracking automatically generated from your programming activity. This extension will be replaced by WakaTime when VS 2022 is officially released.
xUnit.net.TestGenerator2022
xUnit.net.TestGenerator2022 adds xUnit.net Test Generator extensions for Visual Studio 2022. Creates Unit tests with xUnit.net 2.0 framework. Works on Visual Studio 2022.
Visual Studio 2019
Following are the ones which I previously used with Visual Studio 2019. Those are not brought to the upper list due to any of the following reasons,
- Incompatibility with VS 2022
- Not tried myself in VS 2022 (Especially the paid ones)
Free Tools
Better Comments
Better Comments is a Visual Studio extension that gives you the ability to customize the font and opacity of your comments independently of the editor’s font settings. It also adds four additional comment classifications, each classification with its own customizable foreground.
BuildVision
BuildVision visualize the building process in a table format.
Open in Visual Studio Code
Open in Visual Studio Code adds a menu command that lets you open any solution, project, folder and file in Visual Studio Code.
Roslynator 2019
Roslynator 2019 is a collection of 500+ analyzers, refactorings and fixes for C#, powered by Roslyn.
The Essentials
The Essentials is an extension pack for Visual Studio 2019 containing extensions no developer should be without. These extensions will add important functionality that will make you more productive and a happier developer.
Extensions
- Add New File
- Editor Enhancements
- EditorConfig Language Service
- Developer News
- File Icons
- Insert GUID
- Learn the Shortcut
- Markdown Editor
- Output Enhancer
- Tweaks
Trailing Whitespace Visualizer
Trailing Whitespace Visualizer keeps your code files clean by making it easier than ever to identify and remove any trailing whitespace.
Visual Studio IntelliCode
Visual Studio IntelliCode(IntelliCode) is a set of AI-assisted capabilities that improve developer productivity with features like contextual IntelliSense, argument completion, code formatting, and style rule inference.
IntelliCode augments existing developer workflows with machine-learning services that provide an understanding of code and its context. It’s applicable for C#, C++ (in preview), JavaScript/TypeScript (in preview), and XAML code today, and will be updated in the future to support more languages.
Visual Studio Spell Checker (VS2017 and Later)
Visual Studio Spell Checker (VS2017 and Later) is an editor extension that checks the spelling of comments, strings, and plain text as you type or interactively with a tool window. It can also spell check an entire solution, project, or selected items. Options are available to define multiple languages to spell check agains…
Web Essentials 2019
Web Essentials 2019 is the easiest way to set up Visual Studio for the ultimate web development experience.
Extensions
After installing the Web Essentials and restarting Visual Studio, the following extensions will be installed:
- Add New File
- Browser Reload on Save
- Browser Sync
- Bundler & Minifier
- CSS Tools
- Editor Enhancements
- File Icons
- File Nesting
- Glyphfriend
- Image Sprites
- Image Optimizer
- Markdown Editor
- Open Command Line
- Package Installer
- Package Security Alerts
- SVG Viewer
- Web Accessibility Checker
- Web Compiler
- ZenCoding
Paid
NDepend
NDepend is a Visual Studio and Azure DevOps/TFS extension that makes it easy to manage Code Quality on large and complex .NET code base
NCrunch for Visual Studio
NCrunch for Visual Studio is Distributed continuous build and test runner. Persistent Inline Code Coverage, Performance Metrics. Navigation + more!
OzCode
OzCode is a revolutionary debugging extension which complements Visual Studio and supercharges the C# debugging experience!.
ReSharper
ReSharper is a legendary .NET productivity tool: find and fix errors and code smells; navigate and refactor; run unit tests and write quality code faster.
Older Visual Studio Extensions List
Did I miss something? If you think so, drop a line with the extension name in the comments below 👇. I will be updating this post whenever I find a good extension for Visual Studio.
Changelog
2022-01-16
- VS 2022 extensions added
2020-11-14
- Added EF Core Power Tools
2020-08-20
- Added The Essentials
2020-08-09
- Added Open in Visual Studio Code
- Moved NDepend to Paid
2020-04-08
- Added xUnit.net.TestGenerator
2020-03-20
- Added Roslynator 2019.
2020-03-18
- Added Better Comments.
