Useful Visual Studio Extensions

The Visual Studio Gallery is the best place to find tools, controls, extensions and templates to help make your life as a developer easier and more productive.

These extensions are almost always language/platform agnostic and just make Visual Studio better and/or easier to work in. A lot of these owned by Microsoft, Microsoft DevLabs, or Microsoft employees or individuals. These extensions generally fall into language specific or technology specific extensions. That really means they may only b useful to you at certain times.

• Add Empty File
• AutoHistory (Microsoft DevLabs)
• ClipboardHistory
• Code Metrics Viewer 2013
• jQuery Code Snippets
• Commentator
• EditorConfig
• File Nesting
• ItalicComments
• License Header Manager
• Microsoft CodeLens Code Health Indicator (Microsoft DevLabs)
• Move Type To File
• NuGet Package Manager for Visual Studio 2013 (Microsoft)
• Pretty Paste
• CssCop
• Bootstrap Snippet Pack
• Productivity Power Tools 2013 (Microsoft)
• Productivity Power Tools 2015 (Microsoft)
• Visual Studio Spell Checker
• Visual Studio Tools for Git (Microsoft)
• VSCommands for Visual Studio 2013
• Trailing Whitespace Visualizer
• Application Insights for Visual Studio (Microsoft)
• NUnit Test Adapter
• Shared Project Reference Manager
• Snippetizer (Microsoft)
• Web Essentials 2013 for Update 3
• Web Essentials 2015.3
• XAML Regions
• Code Cracker for C#
• .NET Portability Analyzer (Microsoft)
• XAML Formatter
• Refactoring Essentials
• ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate (predefined template pack)
• SideWaffle Template Pack (predefined template pack)

These are only few that I found useful and helpful. But there are lot out there Visual Studio Market Place.

How to change Excel column names form A,B,C to 1,2,3 or vice versa

This happens when excel column labels are numeric rather than alphabetic. For example, instead of seeing A, B, and C at the top of your worksheet columns, you see 1, 2, 3, and so on.

The A1 Reference Style

By default, Excel uses the A1 reference style, which refers to columns as letters (A through IV, for a total of 256 columns), and refers to rows as numbers (1 through 65,536). These letters and numbers are called row and column headings.

The R1C1 Reference Style

Excel can also use the R1C1 reference style, in which both the rows and the columns on the worksheet are numbered. The R1C1 reference style is useful if you want to compute row and column positions in macros. In the R1C1 style, Excel indicates the location of a cell with an "R" followed by a row number and a "C" followed by a column number.

To toggle between A1 and R1C1 Reference styles 

1. Start Microsoft Excel.
2. On the Tools menu, click Options.
3. Click the General tab.
4. Under Settings, click to clear the R1C1 reference style check box (upper-left corner), and then click OK.

If you select the R1C1 reference style check box, Excel changes the reference style of both row and column headings, and cell references from the A1 style to the R1C1 style.

Visual Studio 2017 RC is now available for download

Microsoft announced the Release Candidate (RC) bits of next major version of Visual Studio named as 'Visual Studio 2017', which is already known to us as 'Visual Studio 15'.

Visual Studio 2017 RC offers productive developer tools and powerful services for individual developers and small teams. Visual Studio Community 2017 RC is a free, fully featured, and extensible IDE for individual developers, open source projects, education and academic research. You can create applications for Android, iOS, Windows and the web. Integrated Azure tools make it easy to create cloud-first applications directly out-of-the-box.

Download Visual Studio 2017 RC

Before starting the download, please note that, it is a Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2017 and is a web installer that supports the following languages: Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Taiwan, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese-Brazil, Spanish, Russian and Turkish at this moment.

You can download any of the below editions of Visual Studio 2017 RC directly from Microsoft servers:

• Visual Studio Community 2017 RC - Web Installer
• Visual Studio Enterprise 2017 RC - Web Installer
• Visual Studio Professional 2017 RC - Web Installer
• Visual Studio Test Professional 2017 RC - Web Installer
• Team Foundation Server 2017 RC - Web Installer - ISO/DVD Image

How to turn your Windows 10 PC into a wireless hotspot

Windows 10 includes a feature called "Hosted Network" that allows you to turn your computer into a wireless hotspot.

Whether you're connecting to the internet using a wireless or wired adapter, similar to previous versions, Windows 10 allows you to share an internet connection with other devices with a feature called "Hosted Network".

Hosted Network is a feature that comes included with the Netsh (Network Shell) command-line utility. It's was previously introduced in Windows 7, and it allows you to use the operating system to create a virtual wireless adapter – something that Microsoft refers to "Virtual Wi-Fi" — and create a SoftAP, which is a software-based wireless access point.

Here is nice tutorial that is use full with step by step process. Blogger has given full details for setting up this process

What can you do with Visual Studio17?

Boosted Productivity

Enhancements to code navigation, IntelliSense, refactoring, code fixes, and debugging, saves you time and effort on everyday tasks regardless of language or platform. For teams embracing DevOps, Visual Studio 2017 streamlines your inner loop and speeds up code flow with the brand new real time features such as live unit testing and real-time architectural dependency validation.

Refined fundamentals

There is a renewed focus to enhance the efficiency of the fundamental tasks you encounter on daily basis. From a brand-new lightweight and modular installation tailored to your need, a faster IDE from startup to shut down, to a new way of view, edit, and debug any code without projects and solutions. Visual Studio 2017 helps you stay focused on the big picture.

Streamlined Azure Development

Built-in suite of Azure tools that enable you to easily create cloud-first applications powered by Microsoft Azure. Visual Studio 2017 makes it easy to configure, build, debug, package, and deploy applications and services on Microsoft Azure directly from the IDE.

Five-star mobile Development

With advanced debugging and profiling tools and unit test generation features, Visual Studio 2017 with Xamarin makes it faster and easier than ever for you to build, connect, and tune mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows. You can also choose to develop mobile apps with Apache Cordova or Visual C++ cross platform library development in Visual Studio.

For more information