DPack - Visual Studio add-in

Posted by Jeffrey Vanneste at 06:16 PM on June 09, 2005

Category:

DPack is a FREE collection of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and 2005 tools. DPack is designed to greatly increase developer's productivity, automate repetitive processes and expand upon some of the Visual Studio features.

DPack includes various browser tools that allow the developer to quickly narrow the search down to a particular class, method or assembly type. DPack includes greatly enhanced numbered bookmarks feature, various code navigation tools as well streamlined surround with feature, and much more.


Home page and direct download link


Resharper does a lot of what DPack does but a couple of the nifty features from DPack that I like:



  • Creating bookmarks with CTRL+SHIFT+number and then CTRL+number to jump back to that line.
  • ALT+up or ALT+down will jump to the next or previous method defined.  If you press ALT+Home it will jump to the parent class or namespace at which point you can press ALT+up or down to jump to the next class or namespace in the file.
  • Surround blocks of code with if, switch, property, region, etc blocks.  I like the surround with region one.  As far as I can see there isn't a keyboard command for this but you can still add a button to your toolbar.

It also provides a search tool for finding a method or class like Resharper does but DPack doesn't have the initial load time that Resharper does.

Comments

I'm glad you like my DPack. I saw your post about it and thought I'd share this info with you. There is a new version coming which will address your Surround With comment. It hasn't been announced yet and eta is sometime next month.

Here's what's coming in the next version:
* Keyboard shortcuts for all Surround With commands
* Ability to set and recall bookmarks across files, i.e. fast and easy way to toggle between number of files
* Support for ASP.NET 2.0 projects
* Whidbey look-and-feel with high color icons
* June CTP support

Posted by: Sergey at June 28, 2005 01:24 PM