Visual Studio & TFS 2012 – List of extensions and tools (Part 2)

This post is continued HERE.

Go to Part 1 – List of Product Updates for information on Visual Studio and TFS 2012 updates

Looking for the VS 2010 extensions ? Go to Visual Studio 2010 - List of Product Updates (Part 1) + Extensions (Part 2).

Looking for links to the test adapters, go to this blog post.

UPDATE Aug 18th 2013: Updates: Visual Studio Tools for Git, TypeScript, ReSharper, TFS Power Tools, Code Contracts, Build Manager, Web Essentials,  Code Contracts, tangible T4 editor , Just Decompile, DotPeek   ADDED:  Inmeta AssociateRecentWorkItems , Unit Test Generator

Added separate tools section:  TFS Administration Tool , TFS Team Project Manager

This post is a list of the extensions I recommend for use with Visual Studio 2012. It’s coming up all the time – what to install, where are the download sites, last version, etc etc, and thus I thought it better to post it here and keep it updated. The basics are Visual Studio 2012 connected to a Team Foundation Server 2012.

Many live in a side-by-side environment with Visual Studio 2010. The side-by-side is supported by VS 2012. However, if you installed a component supporting VS2012 before you installed VS2012, then you need to reinstall it. The VSIX installer will understand that it is to apply those only for VS2012, and will not touch – nor remove – the same for VS2010. A good example here is the Power Commands.

The list is more or less in priority order.

The focus is to get a setup which can be used for a complete coding experience for the whole ALM process.

The list of course reflects what I use for my work , so it is by no means complete, and for some of the tools there are equally useful alternatives. Many components have not yet arrived with VS2012 support. I will add them as they arrive.

The components directly associated with Visual Studio from Microsoft should be common, see the Microsoft column.

If you want to use the same set of extensions on multiple computers, you might like to share them easily. Lars Wilhelmsen has a great blog post about how to use Dropbox to share extensions and common settings.

Extensions ready for VS 2012, both upgrades and new ones

#1 Get via Visual Studio’s Tools | Extension Manager (or The Code Gallery). (From Adam : All these are auto updated by the Extension Manager in Visual Studio)

#2 Works with ultimate only

#3 Also works with VS 2010

Tools (outside Visual Studio)

Extensions we wait for, not yet in a VS 2012 version

Extensions which are now integrated into VS 2012