A few months ago I wrote about some small handy extensions I created for Visual Studio. This is part 2 with even more handy extensions. So here are some of the extensions I’ve worked on since then.

Open Command Line

Though I’m not a console-person, I do use both PowerShell and the regular command line quite a bit. Mostly I use the command line to run Grunt commands or with other commands that have to do with my Visual Studio projects.

The problem is that I always have to cd my way to the root of my projects before I start executing any commands.

With the Open Command Line extension I can now just hit Alt+Space  to open my console of choice already on the path of my project root. It supports any console including PowerShell, cmd, Bash etc.

Download Open Command Line on the VS Gallery

Open from Azure Websites

Sometimes when I build websites, I need to download the deployed content and run it locally. That’s a little cumbersome to do manually, so this extension helps make this super easy.

The extensions adds an Open from Azure Websites button that does it all automatically and opens the remote website as a project in Visual Studio.

Download Open from Azure Website on the VS Gallery 

Visual Studio Auto Updater

I love Visual Studio extensions and I use a lot of them every day. However, it can sometimes be annoying to keep them all up-to-date when new versions are released.

The Visual Studio Auto Updater will automatically download and install updates to extensions in the background so you don’t ever have to do it manually again. It will only update the extensions that you have approved for auto updating.

Download Visual Studio Auto Updater on the VS Gallery

All of these extensions are of course open source and available on either my GitHub profile or on the LigerShark profile.

Update Jan 16, 2015 – The newly released Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5 also supports Grunt/Gulp Intellisense using the files available in this blog post. In fact, the Intellisense will be a lot better in CTP 5 due to the support for Object Literal Intellisense in the JavaScript Editor.

I’ve spent some time figuring out how to get Intellisense working for Grunt and Gulp in the JavaScript editor. Today, I hit a breakthrough that lights up Intellisense automatically. All it requires is that you perform the following two steps:

1. Download the JavaScript Intellisense files (zip with two .js files)
2. Copy them to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\JavaScript\References

If you’ve installed Visual Studio under a different path, then you’ll have to find the correct folder at that location instead.

This trick also works in Visual Studio 2015 Preview, but then the folder to copy the JavaScript files to is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\JavaScript\References

Here’s what it looks like when editing GulpFile.js:

And here is GruntFile.js:

This is my first attempt, so please give it a try and let me know what you think. I want to try building this into Visual Studio 2015 so your feedback is super important.