Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools Updated with New Features

When the new Visual Studio 2010 is not enough in its plain vanilla flavor, developers can turn to a collection of free extensions designed to kick up a notch the development platform. In this regard, Microsoft is offering the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools Extensions as a free download through the Visual Studio Gallery on MSDN. An updated version of the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools is now live, the second major release of the extensions since their introduction.

“We shipped an update to the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools which adds some nice new features and enhancements,” revealed Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform. Of course, developers need to have the Productivity Power Tools installed prior to deploying the update.

“If you already have the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools installed, you can update it to the latest release by choosing Visual Studio’s “Tools->Extension Manager” menu command. This will bring up the VS 2010 Extension Manager – which allows you to browse and download new extensions. If you click the “Updates” tab on the left-hand side of the dialog it also allows you to see any updates that are available for extensions you already have installed within your IDE. Simply click the “Update” button for the Productivity Power Tools extension and it will download and install an update for it,” Guthrie added.

Microsoft offers an exhaustive list with all the changes to Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools introduced by the latest update on the VS MSDN Gallery. Via Tools Options Support devs will be able to turn extensions on and off individually; the new Solution Navigator will offer customers the equivalent of the enhanced Solution Explorer; while Quick Access will simplify the searching and execution of common tasks within the Visual Studio IDE. But there are a range of additional enhancements in the update that will make it easier for developers to use Visual Studio 2010.

“If you haven’t installed the free VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools, I highly recommend doing so – I think you’ll find some useful extensions that you’ll like. If you already have last month’s release installed, you can easily update it to this week’s release to take advantage of even more cool features – as well as benefit from bug fixes and performance improvements,” Guthrie said.

Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools are available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.

.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.