On this post I maintain a list of plugins I use with Visual Studio.

1. Power Tools

If you are used to control+click through Eclipse or Idea usage. You will love this set of tools. It has tons of useful tweaks that makes Visual Studio much easier to use.

Available at: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/dbcb8670-889e-4a54-a226-a48a15e4cace

2. VsVim

I’m a big vim fan for ease of navigation, fast editing and movement. If you are this will be a life saver for you, as you will never have to use arrow keys or the mouse for navigation.

Available at: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3-46ca-8fe1-0e90e3f79329

3. Refactoring (Only rename)

This feature is almost expected of IDEs and is primarily one of the reasons why we use them for complex projects. Unfortunately, this plugin only has renaming as the supported refactoring option. I really miss the extract method that was available in other IDEs after I switched to Visual C++ for my work. Anyway, it’s better than nothing.

Available at: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/164904b2-3b47-417f-9b6b-fdd35757d194

4. Image Watch (as mentioned by Chris May)

This is a really cool plugin if you are working with openCV. It helps you get rid of the std::cout statements you need to include to see the contents of matrices, and makes working with images a pleasure rather than a pain.

Available at: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/e682d542-7ef3-402c-b857-bbfba714f78d

Let me know if there are any other plugins that you find useful for coding C++ in Visual Studio.