One of the best features in Visual Studio 2010 is the Extension Manager. It allows you to download, install, disable, enable, and uninstall a variety of extensions for Visual Studio without leaving the IDE. You can access Extension Manager through the Tools menu.

Selecting the Extension Manager will bring you to a dialog containing your installed extensions and an online gallery. The gallery contains many excellent free extensions like the Power Productivity Tools, and it contains commercial products such as Telerik JustCode. It also contains updates to installed extensions, which saves you time from hunting them down yourself. Go to the online gallery to find new extensions to enhance Visual Studio. One of the best extensions to come out recently is NuGet Package Manager.

NuGet is similar to the Extension Manager, but instead of allowing you to install extensions for Visual Studio, it allows you to add libraries to existing projects without the hassle of downloading, installing, and in some cases, configuring them.

To get started, right-click your project references. A new item will appear in the popup menu: Add Library Package Reference. Selecting this will bring up the NuGet Package Manager.

Installing a package will give you access to it in your project and unpack everything to the appropriate locations… this is much better than downloading a zip and placing the pieces of the package in requisite folders within the project! In addition, NuGet will inform you when updates are available for the packages that are installed through it.

If you’re working on an MVC application, try out the open source Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC to gain access to very nice, jQuery-enabled, fluent controls.