Lars Wilhelmsen just wrote up a list of the stuff he’s got going in his tricked out Visual Studio 2008 installation. He tagged me, so here is the lowdown of what I’m rolling with. I’ve always tried to stick to a few tools that I know well rather than running amok with add-ins. Hence there are few su

Lars Wilhelmsen just wrote up a list of the stuff he’s got going in his tricked out Visual Studio 2008 installation. He tagged me, so here is the lowdown of what I’m rolling with.

I’ve always tried to stick to a few tools that I know well rather than running amok with add-ins. Hence there are few surprises in my setup.

• The theme is a slightly customized version of John Lam’s brilliant port of the VibrantInk TextMate theme. I love Vibrant Ink so much that I’ve ported it to IntelliJ IDEA also.
  
• Since I’m a TextMate addict (I’m writing this in TextMate) the font is of course Monaco.
  
• It goes without saying that I’m using JetBrains ReSharper 4.1. Since I’m running Visual Studio on my Mac, I’ve changed some of the key strokes so that they resemble those in IntelliJ, for instance the generate function usually found on Alt + Insert is underneath Control + Enter on my machine.
  
• Test Driven .NET takes care of all my testing needs and NCover tells me whether I’ve been good or bad.
  
• Assembla keeps my code safe and VisualSVN gets my code in and out there.
  
• To get the best possible OS X look on my Visual Studio I’m running a minimal version of Windows XP in Parallels with the Leopard XP BricoPack installed.

So what about short cuts I cannot do without? For starters, Shift + Alt + Enter could have been on the list, but I’m forcing my self to not mouse around by running Visual Studio without any toolbars. That said, I consider myself a R# black-belt so take a look at the Mac IntelliJ keymap. I’d rather tell you about some of the Live Templates I’ve got on. Whenever I do something more than a few times, I take my time to DRY up and create a template for it. For instance I create new NUnit tests by writing NUT and hitting Tab, I even wrote a template for Ayende’s Hack Bomb’s. The same applies to file templates, in addition to the vanilla interface, class and so on, I have templates for WCF contracts, NHibernate HBM maps and lots of other stuff.