After having a couple of friends share useful links with me recently, I decided to do a search for other helpful add-ins and related tools for Visual Studio 2005. Following are what I tried, along with my first impressions:

The Visual Studio 2005 SDK comes with a set of power toys. I won’t detail them all, but SuperDiff and Source Outliner both look to be extremely useful, while the Event Toaster seems quite the opposite — I have no need for the notification it provides, and there’s no straightforward way I’ve found to remove it from the system tray. SuperDiff seems like a decent diff tool with a well thought-out UI. Source Outliner looks like it’s going to be a great way to easily manage and navigate in large files, such as those with a lot of properties or methods, or those with nested classes.

CopySourceAsHTML (CSAH) — this one I’ve got mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it’s a handy tool for generating pre-formatted code to paste to a web page. On the other hand, it can generate some pretty nasty-looking HTML (particularly if you leave all the default settings turned on); and if you’re using a custom color for the text background in the IDE, it has some serious problems with reproducing that accurately. On the third hand (yes, I know, I’m a mutant), it’s relatively customizable and also open-source, so it shouldn’t be too hard to tweak to meet any specific needs.

Alex Papadimoulis, of TheDailyWTF fame, has written Smart Paster, which allows you to paste text in several different formats. I believe this will be quite a handy time-saver, and I’m really impressed with how configurable it is, in a very clean, unobtrusive way.

And finally, I’ve installed TestDriven.NET, which other reviewers seem to applaud as the cadillac of add-ins. This one’s a complete experiment for me, as I’m only beginning to explore TDD, and also have yet to compare it with Team Suite’s built-in testing tools. More later when I get time to give it a thorough “test.”