Recommended extensions for Visual Studio 2017
By terje
It is time to reestablish my list of recommended VSIX extensions to Visual Studio, for 2017 and higher. The list of tools you install now with VSIX is less than before, since so many more tools are available as nuget packages, but there are still some that are very helpful. The list below show some of the ones I have found most useful. I have also added a few non-VSIX tools, but which also installs into Visual Studio.
| Extension | Purpose | Author | Comment |
| Editor Config | Language service for .editorconfig files. EditorConfig helps developers define and maintain consistent coding styles between different editors and IDEs. | Mads Kristensen, MSFT | Adds config file for coding style, follows the source |
| MarkDown Editor | A full featured Markdown editor with live preview and syntax highlighting. Supports GitHub flavored Markdown. | Mads Kristensen, MSFT | Side by side, editor and view |
| Whack Whack Terminal | Terminal emulator for Visual Studio. Allows you to run command prompt, powershell, WSL bash. All including interactive mode. | Daniel Griffin | See details in this blogpost |
| NUnit VS Templates | Provides Visual Studio project and item templates for NUnit 3 along with code snippets. | NUnit team (Rob Prouse) | Item templates |
| Runsettings | A set of Runsettings solution templates for VS2017. Right click the solution, choose Add/New Item and choose one of the Runsettings under General, and the runsettings file is added as a solution item, and opened as XML in your editor. | Terje Sandstrom | Item templates |
| Open Command Line | Opens a command line at the root of the project. Support for all consoles such as CMD, PowerShell, Bash etc. Provides syntax highlighting, Intellisense and execution of .cmd and .bat files. | Mads Kristensen, MSFT | |
| Paket | Manage your Paket dependencies from Visual Studio! | Steffen Forkmann (Paket team) | |
Tools (non VSIX) | |||
| Resharper | Refactoring, Code Analysis, Unit testing, Architecture | Jetbrains | |
| NDepends | Code analysis | NDepends |