Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools Open Sourced -- Visual Studio Magazine

Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools Open Sourced

A number of tools are slowly being open sourced onto the Github repository, with all of them being available over time.

By Michael Domingo
03/21/2016

Microsoft's Visual Studio Engineering team said that it's starting to bring all the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools over to the Github repository to be developed as open source projects.

"Since their introduction, these tools have been updated for every major Visual Studio release, and a number of features that started out as part of the Productivity Power Tools are now core features of Visual Studio," write VS senior program managers, Justin Clareburt and Michael Dick, in a blog post.

Some of the extensions that were originally part of the VS-PPTs are often incorporated right into Visual Studio. Recently, the Color Printing, Colorized Parameter Help, and Organize VB Imports were integrated into the lates VS 2015 release. Current VS-PPT extensions being being open sourced include: Align Assignments, Copy As HTML, Fix Mixed Tabs, Ctrl+Click Go to Definition, and Match Margin, to name a few (current full list is here).

You can download the most recent version of the VS-PPT in the Visual Studio Gallery here.Besides obtaining and contributing to the current set of tools, Visual Studio 2015 various methods for creating extensions. To start developing them, you can find more information here.

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