Delta Engine Blog

Now this is really good news because I have been working with Orcas for over 2 months now and most of the features of CodeRush did not work in Visual Studio Orcas (even with my hack I posted a few months back). The new version of CodeRush, 2.2.2, finally supports parsing C# 3.0 and has MANY bugfixes and also quite a lot of new features. It was released last month, but I was quite busy and did not notice the update until now (they should implement a rss feed for updates ^^). Refactor! works also great and I might use it more often now (used mostly the refactor features of VS or some other tools in the past). Many thanks fly out to DevExpress, if you look below not many addins have support for Visual Studio Orcas, and CodeRush is best Visual Studio Addin ever, just for this reason alone :)

Because I'm currently developing a addins and even a VS package too (because I develop in IronPython right now, will post on that in a few days), I checked out some other addins. Here is my quick overview:

CoolCommands 3.0 adds some nice features to VS, mainly to improve interaction between VS, projects and the explorer or command line
MZ-Tools is a great addin for Visual Studio I never have heard of before (and I know a lot of addins). It has a long feature list, check it out yourself ^^ Sadly it does not support VS Orcas yet, but it works nicely in VS2005 and does not override any behaviour of other addins like CodeRush as far as I can tell.
CodeIt.Right and CodeIt.Once I have heard of them before, but I never really installed it and check it out. It provides many useful reformating, refactoring and produtivity features, which allow you to quickly add existing code, reformat it automatically and apply rules for all developers on a project. They have also 3 short videos on their website so you can quickly see what this is about. Again no VS Orcas support yet as it seems.
SmartOutline is also an addin from the CodeIt.Right guys, they won the 3rd place in the VS Studio Extensibility Contest. All this addin does is add regions, but it is free to download and use. Not sure why this is great, my Commenter plugin could do that 3 years ago and does it in a much faster way (shortcut: Ctrl+3). CodeRush does support it too (Ctrl+R or Ctrl+3 too).
TestMatrix for Visual Studio .NET is a unit testing, code coverage and profiling addin. I'm not sure where the profiling comes in (I got Ants Profiler for that, havn't found a better tool yet. But I would like a better tool because Ants Profiler hasn't changed much in 2 years, which suxx), but the code coverage and unit testing features are nice. Probably not worth buying if you use TestDriven.Net like me. Code coverage can also be covered via NCover (a lot of covering in this sentence ^^).
Spell Checker is a really useful addin. Like using Word, when the spell checker is there, everything feels right, but when it is missing, it gets very annoying when you need it. I used the SpellChecker for CodeRush from RindHand, but Spell Checker is also very good.
Koders Addin for Visual Studio 2005 is also cool, but like most of the plugins, it only works in VS2005, no Orcas support yet. I have installed it for a long time, but I never use it. Dunno why, the idea is great, it allows access to many billion lines of source code and prevents you from re-inventing the wheel.
CodeKeep is very similar to Koders, but it focuses on code snippets. I have not used this addin before, but I will try it out, maybe I will use it more often than Koders.
I might also have installed 50 million other addins, but I have no time to talk about all of them, most of them are not worth mentioning ^^ In the past I have also talked quite a bit about addins and tools for Visual Studio, including TestDriven.Net, LineCounter, CodeRush, VisualAssist (for C++), CodeSmith and more. They are still great addins, no reason to mention them again, you know them probably already ^^