Microsoft has been on quite the open source push lately. The company joined the Eclipse Foundation, a non-profit organization that oversees the Eclipse open source community building developer tools, and announced SQL Server for Linux. In addition, Microsoft also announced new interoperability between Azure, Visual Studio Team Services, and Codenvy’s workspace automation tools built on Eclipse Che.
Now, according to a report by InfoWorld, Microsoft has published the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools on GitHub, making them available to the open source community. Here’s the list of what’s included:
- Align Assignments, for aligning assignment statements
- Copy As HTML, which puts raw HTML onto a clipboard in plain text format
- Fix Mixed Tabs, which warns when a file contains both tabs and spaces
- Ctrl+Click Go to Definition, for clickable hyperlinks to symbols in code
- Match Margin, which highlights textual matches of token in Editor
- Middle Click Scroll, for scrolling quickly through a document
- Peek F1, which provides help content inline
- Structure Visualizer, for visual cues syntactically signifying code blocks
- Syntactic Line Compression, which improves screen usage
- Timestamp margin, which adds time-stamp data to Output window in debug mode
According to Justin Clarebert and Michael Dick, senior program managers for Microsoft’s Visual Studio tools:
Making the current set of tools available to the community is important to us, and we hope it will also inspire developers with concrete examples of what can be achieved with extensions of their own.
We fully expect Microsoft to continue their involvement in open source, both in response to market pressures and to continue their cross-platform push. Perhaps we’ll hear more about such efforts at Build 2016, which begins later this month.