Visual Studio, while pretty feature laden, isn’t the type of editor that a modern day front end guru salivates for. When I first started developing in a .Net environment I found it pretty cumbersome and even a little intimidating. These days, it rivals my favorite HTML/CSS editors now that I’ve configured it to my liking and made 3 significant (but easy) adjustments.
1. Tabs Studio
The tab system in visual is pretty poor for such a heavily developed system. Tabs studio allows you to have multiple rows, coloring, grouping.. just a ton of features that should have been included but never were. The time it will save you is well worth the $50 Price Tag.
Link: http://www.tabsstudio.com/
2. Color Scheme/Code Highlighting: Resharper- Son of obsidian
This gorgeous ready to go color scheme has great CSS/HTML/Javascript schemes and is easy on the eyes. If you have to wrangle code, it may as well be easy on the eyes!
http://studiostyl.es/schemes/resharper-son-of-obsidian
3. devColor
An editor without a full featured color picker? This won’t do! Check out this free add on to give you some robust color underline and picker features, simply a must for developing attractive and precise interfaces and visuals.
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/7dbae8b3-5812-490e-913e-7bfe17f47f1d/
Now if I can only find a way to make their auto format tool acceptable…
