Making Visual Studio perfect

Text Sharp is a free extension for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012 that lets you adjust text clarity in the IDE.

v1.5 adds the ability to selectively apply the text rendering mode only to the main Visual Studio window or to the code editor.

Download the installer.

It is undesirable, but often necessary to have duplicate blocks of text in multiple files. For example, Google Analytics tracking code in html files or copyright notices in code files. When you need to update this text, sometime you can do it with a simple search and replace. But when you want to make sure no other text is changed or when you want to add or remove lines, multiline search and replace is necessary. Sync Block Edit hides all the complexity of writing multiline find and replace patterns from you.

If your text is already enclosed with distinct begin and end signature lines, just make your changes in one of the files, select the block and click the Sync Update Block button from the Sync Block Edit toolbar:

Update text with Sync Block Edit

In the Update Text dialog, begin and end lines are automatically filled. You select which files you want to update and click Update. In all files the text between the begin and end lines will be replaced with the selected text from the active document.

If your block in not yet enclosed, it is recommended to add distinct begin and end signature lines before modification. Select the block in one of the files and click the Sync Create Block button from the Sync Block Edit toolbar:

Create block with Sync Block Edit

In the Create Block dialog enter begin and end lines. Select which files you want to update and click Create. In all files this text block will be enclosed with the begin and end lines. After that you can update the block as described above.

You can download the free Sync Block Edit extension for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012 from the Sync Block Edit homepage.

When you edit a UTF-8 file in Visual Studio, it adds the byte order mark (BOM) sequence to the beginning of the file. You can select an encoding manually, but you need to do it each time you reopen the file.

Fix File Encoding automatically detects when a UTF-8 file is opened in Visual Studio and sets its encoding to UTF-8 without signature. If you don’t edit the file, it remains unmodified. If you edit the file, it will be saved without the BOM. You can configure which files to encode based on the file path and the file extension (by default, only .html files are protected from Visual Studio).

You can download the free Fix File Encoding extension for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012 from the Fix File Encoding homepage.