Visual Studio .NET add-ins

Until recently, I never really tried using a lot of the tools that ship with Visual Studio .NET. I had my method of developing and I stuck to it. Then, after reading a chapter out of Pro Visual Studio .NET, all that changed. I read the chapter on macros and looked at their Property Builder example. This, of course, inspired me to rewrite the property builder I had created for VB6 as a stand-alone application. Well, one thing led to another and before you know it had jumped from macros to add-ins and created a much more robust version of my original application. I know you are thinking, “so, you went from a stand-alone application to one that relies on Visual Studio.” The difference is purely convenience. For me to run my original application, I had to leave my development environment, surf to a folder on my hard drive and then run the application. Now, I just select an option from the Tools menu (or wherever I decide to place it). And because it is so much more convenient to run, I am much more likely to build more of these types of tools.