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Plugins Provide New Customizations to VS2013

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The Solution Explorer area of Visual Studio has long used nesting to balance accessibility and clarity within a project's subfolders.  Given the number of files in use with most projects today, having this nesting ability apply to other project items without having to physically relocate them would be a helpful organizational aid.  Mads Kristensen has released a new File Nesting extension for Visual Studio that does just that. 

It offers several options:  nest a file when commanded to by the user, nest a selection of files, or enable automatic nesting for an entire project.  File Nesting currently supports Visual Studio 2013, but support for VS2012 is planned according to Kristensen.  The extension may be downloaded from the Visual Studio gallery while the source for the project is on GitHub.

 

Remembering to save with automatic snapshots

Recently released extension AutoHistory provides Visual Studio 2013 users with a new way to maintain their work.  If you use source control features like TFS or Git, you are used to having the ability to rewind changes to your project.  But what if you haven’t made a commit in a while, or what if what you committed isn’t really the approach you want to take?

AutoHistory’s approach to these scenarios is to automatically save the changes in files you have edited in your project at automatic intervals.  You may look back over the chronology at any time to diff a changed file with its current contents.  The extension currently stores changes for up to 3 days, but also provides for storing user-directed snapshots and regular file save events.  Auto-snapshots are taken every 5 minutes. 

Channel 9 provides a helpful introduction to AutoHistory if you are interested in learning more.  AutoHistory is a preview, so user feedback is still being actively solicited.

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