I have recently found a great add-in Visual studio 2010 - Productivity Power Tools. It adds new options. It’s not that good like the commercial versions of CodeRush or R#. It’s for free and that’s a great thing.

Power Commands add many great additions :

One of those features is automatic sorting and removing of the using statements while saving. So simple but so great.

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New solution navigator replaces the solution explorer. It is similar to the reflector  menu. One minor minus thought,  It works really slow;/

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Solution navigator contains a simple filter. It can show only open,  unsaved or recently edited files.

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This feature is simple but it really makes you smile. Little red dot indicating if the document isn’t saved. It’s so small but so great. It’s really better than “*” char.

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More advanced object browser in intelisense. Inspect items on the fly with a search box.

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While testing, I encountered only minor glitches. When exploring item with the new intelligence menu I had “Visual Studio 2010 is not responding”. In the future releases  they should improve the loading time.

You can turn off some functions if you will encounter a major performance drop. Performance was also an issue in R#. I remember when I had just 1GB of ram and with the R# project had a starting time around 2-3 minutes. It was really annoying.

I m still exploring all the features. Check the site Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools

Wonder why this is not included in the vanilla VS ?