KeyTraino for Visual Studio 2005

A good productivity plug in is Visual Assist X from Whole Tomato Software.
http://www.wholetomato.com/
I have been using it for a while and really like it.

It has a lot good features.
Multilanguage support – C++, .Net etc
Vastly improved intellisense
Autotext (improved version of code sippets)
Smart file opener
Improved Code colorizer
Improved symbol search (beats the pants off Find in Files)
Improved refactoring
Good support ( they answer their Support Forum posts )

Yeah yeah I know it sounds like a sales pitch, but I have been developing with it for a while and have noticed productivity gains.

Hi, I’m one of the developers from SlickEdit that worked on Gadgets. First, I want to say thanks to all the people who have tried it out, especially those that commented on it.

I also wanted to respond to JesterXXV’s post… we’re sorry that you had a bad experience with Gadgets and would be very interested in hearing more about what went wrong. There is an “About…” menu item which brings up the information about Gadgets and links to our forums, where you can post bugs. (http://community.slickedit.com/index.php?board=3.0)

We did release a new version last night (11/8 3:30pm est) with a handful of fixes. We haven’t had anyone complain of lockups or crashes, though, so we’d be very interested to hear more information about what you saw.

Thanks again to everyone who has taken it for a spin!

I say we change the captcha from orange to banana here.

Say, on that topic, what is the point of a static captcha anyways?

I wonder if you could get the banana to dance by syntax errors… Hmmm…

Or the guy from the Muppets and have it play the “Manamana” song too!

I just downloaded SlickEdit Gadgets, and installed on my corporate PC with Visual Studio 2005. I had the same bad luck as JesterXXV - “Visual Studio has encountered an error… Check the box to restart Visual Studio…” I uninstalled SlickEdit Gadgets and the errors stopped.

I find it unbelievable when “SlickEdit Inc” on November 9, 2006 06:43 AM says that “we haven’t had anybody complain of lockups or crashes…” Then he expects us to gather and forward debugging info. Test your own stuff sparky.

MAYBE (just maybe) you guys haven’t heard about these issues, but I doubt that. If you have not, then it just means that most developers won’t waste any more time complaining about a broken piece of junk that was free anyway. It already screwed me by wasting my time on install and uninstall. What possible satisfaction can I expect by complaining to the guys who couldn’t debug their product in the first place?

I got what I paid for, and I’m done with SlickEdit tools. Thanks for nothing.

I tried to use a free productivity tool, and it sabotaged my productivity for 1/3 of a day. Nice.

I think you just found the greatest advancement on keeping your sanity.

I’ll pimp Visual Assist too. I’ve used it for C++ for years now, and I’m absolutely lost without it.

It takes a bit of getting used to, and it doesn’t always get its suggestions right, but it’s still really great. “Goto method” (Alt+G), “Find method in current file” (Alt+M) and “open file in workspace” (Shift+Alt+O) are just so handy it’s untrue, even if you’re no big fan of the intellisense enhancements.

It also turns “.” into “-” when you type it after the name of something that’s a pointer. I don’t even want to think about how many keypresses this has saved me.