Visual Studio Extensions

Visual Studio extensions can significantly improve the experience through useful information accessibility, additions, feature additions, and changes.

Essentials

• Solution Error Visualizer - show messages in solution explorer (errors, warnings)
• Output enhancer or VSColorOutput64 - Color output and debug log
• Add New File - Add a file through filename (simplifies file creation)
• Trailing Whitespace Visualizer - highlight/mark trailing whitespace
• Markdown Editor v2 - because every project has md files; at minimum a README.md

Optional

• Match Margin - text match indicators in editor sidebar
• File Icons - Additional various file type icons
• Show Selection Length
• Time Stamp Margin - Prefix debug log with timestamps

Situational

• TOML Editor - if you have TOML files
• SVG Viewer - if you edit SVG files
• Fine Code Coverage - For unit test code coverage

Subjective

• Shrink Empty Lines - reduce height of empty lines (compress empty vertical space)

Candidates

• Color Preview - CSS color preview - VS does this natively now, right?
• Tweaks - A lot of settings and features
• Syntax Highlighting Pack - Additional syntax highlighting (Clojure, Go, Jade, Lua, Swift, Ruby, …)
• File Nesting - nest files by file name - now VS native?

Publisher Note

Most of these Visual Studio extensions are published by Microsoft DevLabs and Mads Kristensen (a Microsoft employee).