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What sort of tools would you expect to fall under the name “Power Toys for Visual Studio”?

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To all the developers out there who love power toys, I could use your help on this one. 

If I were to call our power toys collection “Power Toys for Visual Studio”, what sort of tools come to mind?  Do you think of

a. tools that assist in debugging, writing code better and faster, etc.
b. tools that enhance Visual Studio, like MSBee and TFS Administration Tool
c. add-ins, packages, and macros for Visual Studio that live only within the environment?
d. all of the above

It is my hope that you’ll circle answer D: All of the above.  I’ve heard good arguments to use “Power Toys for Visual Studio” and I’ve heard good arguments to use “Developer Power Toys” or “Power Toys for Developers.”  My concern is that if I went with “Power Toys for Visual Studio”, would you expect to find tools like the Managed Stack Explorer or a .NET install verification tool (something we’re thinking about for upcoming sprints)?

Another way to think of this is if I had to rename the power toys blog to something, like “Power Toys for ____” blog, what would go into the blank?

Let me know your thoughts.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2006
    I think its a D.
    But i find that C do the same thing as A.
    For instance ReSharper from JetBrains helps you doing things like you said in A.

    If they renamed it to "Power Toys For ___" i would think "Thats power toys for *", as in everything. Everything from Windows Xp, to Visual Studio 2005.
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2006
    Hi all, I’m Sara Ford, a Program Manager on the Developer Solutions team.  I’m going to be helping...
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2006
    Since I've been around Windows since 1995, "power toys" still has the connotation of "cool ways to tweak the GUI" to me (probably based on the popularity of TweakUI), so I'd say B and C.
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2006
    #C

    I'd expect option (a) to be bundled into Debugging Tools for Windows or Platform SDK Tools.

    I'd expect option "B" to be bundled into a) or c).
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2006
    Definitely D. I consider anything that enhances the product a power tool, no matter how that enhancement is used. Personally I think the name is less important that marketting - letting people know about the tools and getting that message to the widest possible audience.
  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2006
    I think the current name is pretty good, but I can see the point as to why you might want to change it to get a wider audience.

    If that's the case, why not just Power Toys for Developers? It's not tying the brand to a particular Microsoft product or technology, but it seems to me that that is actually what you're concerned about. I don't think there is a "right" technology brand name to pull in the broadest audience, because even the broadest is exclusive to some degree.

    I guess another possible change would be to make it Power Tools for Developers - some developers may be reluctant to rely on a utility referred to as a toy, whereas MSBee (for example) is a tool you need to commit to in order to get the benefit.
  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2006
    It coudn't be anything else than D for me.
  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2006
    "Developer Power Toys" gets my vote.

    The power of MSBee is that it breaks the tyranny of the monolithic Visual Studio build. Removing Visual Studio from the equation is a feature.

    This isn't to say I don't like Visual Studio. It's just there's more to developer solutions than Visual Studio and decoupling them is a good thing.
  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    "PowerToys for Microsoft Development"
    Anywho, D would be my answer, too, of course.
    Other categories/tools that I would like to see:
    1. Automation/batch management of something that is painful to do on an individual basis; e.g. ripping through a dir (and subdirs) to remove/check bad references (as described in http://rickyfaulstich.net/StichBLOG/archive/2006/01/19/SlowVisualStudio2005.aspx).
    2. Develop an app/data provider that reports/queries our local project folders ("databases") against solution or project files ("tables") and attributes ("columns.") e.g. SELECT ProjectFilename, ProjectTargetAssemblyName FROM MyProjectsDir1 WHERE ProjectProductVersion NOT LIKE '8.%'
  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2009
    PingBack from http://castironbakeware.info/story.php?title=sara-ford-s-weblog-what-sort-of-tools-would-you-expect-to-fall-under