Web Standards Update provides HTML5 & CSS3 support to Visual Studio 2010 SP1. It brings VS 2010 Intellisense & validation as close to W3C specification as possible in a Visual Studio extension. The most notable features are:
- HTML5 – Video, Audio, Input Type, Drag & Drop, WAI-ARIA, Microdata, Schema.org
- Browser API – GeoLocation & Local Storage
- CSS3 – 2D Transforms, 3D Transforms, Animations, Background & Borders, Basic Box Model, Basic UI, Behavior, Color, Flexible Box Layout, Fonts, Paged Media, Hyperlink Presentation, Line, Lists, Marquee, Media Queries, Multi Column, Namespaces, Presentation Levels, Ruby, Selectors, Speech, Syntax, Template Layout, Text & Transitions. It also supports vendor specific prefixes like –ms, -webkit & -moz.
Note that this isn’t an official Microsoft product release. It was created by Microsoft employees on the Web Platform and Tools team in their spare time.
Web Standards Update for VS 2010
Announcement, Features and Details
PerfWatson is a low-overhead telemetry system that helps Visual Studio capture instances of UI unresponsiveness and report them back to Microsoft automatically and anonymously. Microsoft then uses this data to drive performance improvements that make Visual Studio faster.
Here’s how it works: when the tool detects that the Visual Studio UI has become unresponsive, it records information about the length of the delay and the root cause, and submits a report to Microsoft. The Visual Studio team can then aggregate the data from these reports to prioritize the issues that are causing the largest or most frequent delays across our user base. By installing the PerfWatson extension, you are helping Microsoft identify and fix the performance issues that you most frequently encounter on your PC.
Download PerfWatson
Spec Explorer 2010 is a tool that extends Visual Studio for modeling software behavior, analyzing that behavior by graphical visualization, model checking, and generating standalone test code from models. Behavior is modeled in two ways: by writing rules in C# (with dynamic data-defined state spaces) and by defining model scenarios as action patterns in a regular-expression style.
Spec Explorer 2010 Release 3.5 contains new features, improved documentation, plus over 60 bug fixes. It runs on the Visual Studio 2010 Professional level product and above.
Spec Explorer Home Page
Pex and Moles are FREE Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools created by Microsoft Research that help developers unit test .NET applications.
Pex is a Visual Studio add-in that automatically generates test suites with high code coverage. From within the Visual Studio code editor, Pex finds interesting input-output values for your methods, which you can then save as a small test suite.
Moles allows developers to replace any .NET method with a delegate. Moles supports unit testing by providing isolation via detours and stubs. Moles comes with Pex or can be installed alone as a Microsoft Visual Studio add-in.
Pex and Moles
Vingy 1.0 is a simple but effective add-in for Visual Studio 2010 that enables you to search the Web (especially programming sites like StackOverflow, CodeProject, MSDN etc.) from within the Visual Studio IDE and filter results based on sources. The author plans to release this add-in as open source.
Download Vingy from Visual Studio Extensions Gallery
Introducing Vingy
SSMS Tools Pack is a free add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2005, 2008, 2008 R2 and their respective Express versions. It contains a few upgrades to the SSMS IDE that were thought to be missing. Current features include:
- SQL Snippets
- Window Connection Coloring
- Query Execution History and Current Window History
- Format SQL
- Search Table, View or Database Data
- Run one script on multiple databases
- Copy execution plan bitmaps to clipboard or file
- Search Results in Grid Mode
- Generate Insert statements from resultsets, tables or database
- Regions and Debug sections
- Running custom scripts from Object Explorer
- CRUD stored procedure generation
- New query template
SSMS Tools Pack Homepage
Linquify is a Visual Studio 2008/2010 add-in and C# .NET business class generator for LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework, helping to support rapid development of .NET and ASP .NET web application data layers. Linquify is free for use under the LGPL.
Linquify installs as a Visual Studio 2008/2010 add-in, which allows you to select your LINQ to SQL dbml file or Entity Framework edmx file and automatically generate a set of easy to use business classes. The generated classes allow you to support a complete 3-tier software architecture and simple handling of database objects, with full support for LINQ queries. Customizations to the generated classes can be easily made within the generated user partial classes.
Linquify on CodePlex
Linquify Homepage
Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 is a free process template for Team Foundation Server 2010. Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for project management and agile software development. A process template is a collection of files that define the various process elements of a team project on a Team Foundation Server. Included in a process template are definitions for your teams work items, work item queries, builds, reports, and SharePoint portal. Each of these artifacts help you manage the work for your software project, track and report on important trends, and ultimately drive toward releasing high quality software on time.
Visual Studio Scrum
Some developers have been frustrated for years with the behavior of tabs in Visual Studio. Changes in how tabs work in Visual Studio 2010 have alleviated some of this frustration, but some developers are unhappy with the changes.
Radames Cruz Moreno, a developer on the Visual Studio Platform Team, has created a FREE Visual Studio extension that provides configurable behavior for document tabs. It is available in the Visual Studio Gallery as part of the Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools.
Key features include:
- Scrollable, vertical and pinned tabs
- Show close button in tab or tab well
- Sort tabs by project or alphabetically
- Color tabs according to project or regular expressions
- Modify dirty indicator style
- Modify minimum and maximum tab size
Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools
Document Well 2010 Plus Features
Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools is a set of free extensions to Visual Studio Professional (and above) which improves developer productivity. This is a Microsoft-supported release, shipping on the Visual Studio Gallery. It is a package of extremely powerful Code Editor extensions, including a number of very commonly requested features.
Download Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools
New Features Explained
