Visual Studio 2005 is pretty useable on its own. MS has really done a good job and the studio is one of the reasons I stay on the MS platform. I've used Java, Ruby etc and I ended up using eclipse for my IDE and while it does a decent job it also seems to have heavy system requirements and theres the feeling that everything is kind of duct taped together But I digress, the reason for this post is to highlight tools that make Visual Studio even more useable. So Here they are:
1. Cool Commands
Everything except (including?) the kitchen sink
Adds context menu commands like open project folder etc. It just keeps getting bigger and better. You have to try it to get the full effect.
Most Recent version of Cool Commands
2. CopySourceAsHTML
Ultimate Blogger Tool
If you have a blog and who doesn't these days, you should look into this one. It lets you copy souce out of Visual Studio and keep the code formatted as HTML which is very helpful if you are trying to post code to a blog.
CopySourceAsHtml
3. Smart Paster
The easy way to embedded SQL, JavaScript, etc
This one gives you multiple Paste As... options in the context menu. Helpful for pasting inline SQL (oh my), JavaScript, XSLT, etc.
Smart Paster
Additional resource for Visual Studio 2005 Add-Ins