Visual Studio Add-in - RockScroll

A few months ago Scott Hanselman bring to all community fellows a new Visual Studio add-in called RockScroll.

RockScroll was an internal tool from Microsoft but Scott convinced Microsoft to allow him to make it available to community as a "Works on my machine" tool. This means that RockScroll is released with exactly zero warranty or support.

But what does this tool anyway? Simply replace the default vertical scrollbar  with an improved one where the background is the thumbnail of the current code file.

Well, better take a look.

As you can see this add-in let you know where you are editing in a more accurate way and, beside this, you can also easily locate comment lines, breakpoints and changed lines.

The only point I dislike is related to regions. Since the thumbnail is generated based on the file content, if you have collapsed regions you will find difficult to scroll exactly where you want.

You can use it in both in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. The Visual Studio 2010 will be shipped with a similar scrollbar(probably an improved version of RockScroll).

I've been using it in VS 2005 since was made available and I can say I didn't notice any related problem or performance hit.

You can get it here. Go try it now.

I made this post draft in September and forgot to publish it. Since then I redirect all colleagues and friends that notice I was using this add-in to this blog. Only a few days ago I notice the post wasn't there so, to them, my apologies.