Updated Productivity Power Tools Now Available

Last month we announced the Productivity Power Tools at TechEd in New Orleans.  The next version of those tools are now available here.  This updated version provides fixes and changes based on your feedback (thanks!) including the ability to turn individual features on/off.  Sean has a great blog post on the Visual Studio team blog outlining the new features. 

There is a lot to explore in the new release.  Two of my new favorites are the Solution Navigator and Quick Access.

Solution Navigator

Solution Navigator gives you an aggregated of the Solution Explorer, Class View, Object Browser, Call Hierarchy, Navigate To, and Find Symbol References in one window.  Here’s an example from my Windows Phone 7 application looking for everything related to persisting settings between runs (new sample post coming up on that one):

Quick Access

Visual Studio has literally thousands of menus and options available to you and it can be daunting trying to figure out where everything is.  We’ve started to place some of the most obvious ones on the start page (connect to TFS, Open a project) and related areas.  Quick Access now gives you an easy way to search the product by hitting Ctrl+3:

Summary

We built a lot of platform support into VS2010 including the new WPF editor, DGML, etc.  You should expect us to continue adding new value like these Power Tools going forward.  We’d really like your feedback as we plan out the next version of Visual Studio.  Which of the new tools would you like to see permanently built into VS?  Are there new areas we should be adding going forward?  Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 19, 2010
  Wow..with this tool it would be a loot easier to handle Windows Phone 7.. I like to see the quick access permanently

• Anonymous
  July 20, 2010
  I think the solution navigator should be included in a future version of VS.  I also think the Toolbox and Properties windows should receive filter capabilities a la Solution Navigator.  I'm coding for WinForms - I think perhaps filtering is available with WPF Properties already if I'm not mistaken.

• Anonymous
  July 20, 2010
  Hi Jason, Extensions are a great feature, but if too many get added to a right click context menus then your productivity goes right down due to having to hunt for the right menu item. Basically it's this bug I've found; any chance of getting it sorted and patched as it's dead annoying? connect.microsoft.com/.../inconsistent-behaviour-positioning-sizing-context-menus It takes the usefulness out of some extensions.

• Anonymous
  July 20, 2010
  and bug... connect.microsoft.com/.../please-avoid-scrolling-context-menus-when-vertical-space-is-available

• Anonymous
  July 24, 2010
  There's also the original context menu bug which is currently at #4 in the VS highest voted bugs list on Connect: connect.microsoft.com/.../vsipissue-context-menus-open-in-scrolling-mode-while-there-is-place-to-show-the-whole-menu

• Anonymous
  July 28, 2010
  Hi Jason, great tools. But after installing it I cannot run my VS 2010 as administrator. It crashes. I have to disable power tools to open VS as administrator.

• Anonymous
  July 29, 2010
  Hi Gustavo! Could you please send me mail at chris.dias (at) microsoft.com so that we can try to narrow down the problem? i cannot reproduce it here. Thanks! Chris

• Anonymous
  August 01, 2010
  Really AWESOME, Really very COOOOOOL but when I opened my website NOT web application, when I click on the default.aspx.cs file to expand it, I got this message : "Unable to get code items." and also, the Advanced Add Reference Dialog doesn't work when I opened a website NOT web application Finally, in little words "AWESOME work, INNOVATIVE extensibility in this GREAT Product VS 2010 :)