I’ve recently had to set up several machines for use with Visual Studio 2010 and found that I just about had to install several extensions, as they’re so useful in normal day-to-day programming.

They are:

• The NuGet Package Manage (easily pull programming libraries into your project)
• AnhkSVN for Visual Studio (great Subversion integration)
• Productivity PowerTools (the “Locate in Solution Explorer” function alone makes this worth downloading)
• VSCommands (the File Structure Viewer and enhanced syntax highlighting makes this one very nice)
• DevColor (provided additional functions for setting colors in CSS/HTML files, right from the VS edit window)
• IndentGuides (visualizes indents. Yeah, so you’re not REALLY supposed to have a for loop that spans pages of code, but hey, sometimes you have to read other people’s code, right? <g>)

There’s tons more extensions accessible from Tools/Extension Manage right inside Visual Studio, so if you haven’t browsed through it in a while, it might be worth a few minutes!

Oh, and, two more tools to throw out there. Grab a copy of the freeware Snarl from the guys at Fullphat and then download CommitMonitor, which connects to Snarl and provides you with toast notifications of checkins from other developers in Subversion projects that you care about. Handy stuff if your shop uses SVN.