PowerCommands in Visual Studio

I always found it cumbersome to expand and collapse project items in solution explorer tree, especially when one has more than 5 projects in a solution. Though there should be a command like "Collapse All" or "Expand All". My wish has been fulfilled by PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008.

PowerCommands is a Visual Studio extensibility package developed by VSX team at Microsoft. The installation package and source code is available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/PowerCommands/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=559. In order to compile the source code you will need Visual Studio 2008 SDK available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=30402623-93ca-479a-867c-04dc45164f5b&displaylang=en.

The package makes few things really easy and enhances productivity. It has features like:

• Copy and Paste references from one project to another
• Open Visual Studio Command prompt with project location as directory
• Copy project as reference so that it can be pasted in another project as reference
• Convert constant strings inside source code to string constants
• Close all open editors (documents) etc. etc.

For more details please refer to http://blogs.msdn.com/vsxteam/archive/2008/02/29/PowerCommands-for-Visual-Studio-2008-released.aspx.
I am going to extend the source to add specific commands for my current project. Will write about that next.

Enjoy!