Barbaric Tip of the Week is a weekly series whose main purpose is to share tiny bits of knowledge that I find specially useful and interesting.

This week’s Barbaric Tip is Mads Kristensen’s great Web Extension Pack for Visual Studio, a bundle of super helpful plugins that will improve your web development experience and bring modern web development into Visual Studio 2015.

If you are familiar with modern web development you’ll have noticed that it is very command-line driven. If command-line is not your cup of tea, or you just feel more comfortable staying inside the comfortable walls of Visual Studio, then the Web Extension Pack is right for you, since it brings all these modern web development tools right into Visual Studio. The bundle contains:

• Web Essentials 2015: Epic Visual Studio Plugin that has many small editor improvements, features and shortcuts to make your life as a web developer easier.
• Web Compiler: A plugin that lets you compile LESS, SASS, JSX, ES6 and CoffeeScript within Visual Studio or MsBuild. (Although you might consider making this a part of your front-end pipeline)
• Web Analyzer: Get static analysis for JavaScript, TypeScript, JSX, CoffeeScript, CSS right inside Visual Studio.
• Image Optimizer: Optimize your images for web consumpton. No more serving 3 Mb jpegs!
• Glyphfriend: Gives you a nice preview of the glyphicons in the most common icon fonts such as FontAwesome, Bootstrap Glyphicons, etc
• Bootstrap Snippet Pack: Collection of Bootstrap snippets, no more need to browse www.bootstrap.com for code samples xD
• Open Command Line: This extension lets you open a command line at the root of the project from within Visual Studio. Supports PowerShell, cmd, bash, etc… and provides syntax highlighting, Intellisense and execution of .cmd and .bat files.
• Package Installer: With the package installer plugin you can easily install packages from the most common package managers right within Visual Studio: Bower, npm, JSPM, TSD and NuGet.

Go Get it now!! :)

And if you are interested in contributing check their repository at GitHub.

Hi All! I am going be speaking and spreading the JavaScript love next February at Swetugg 2016 in beautiful Stockholm!

The title of the talk is… you guessed it! Mastering the Arcane Art Of JavaScript-mancy and this is the abstract (do you call it abstract?):

For many years has JavaScript been frown upon and look down on by many developers due to its quirky nature, obscure behaviors and many a one WTFs that populate its hairy APIs.

Frown upon no more! For with modern design patterns, libraries, tools and the long awaited JavaScript 6 Harmony (ES6, ES2015) writing JavaScript is now a pleasure.

Join me at the school of JavaScript-mancy as we travel along the modern landscape of writing JavaScript in 2015 and beyond, as we discover the organic evolution of this beautiful language and its thriving ecosystem, and delve in the latest features/spells/incantations of the JavaScript Arcana.

Hope to see you there! I’ll keep you updated as the date draws near with some of the awesome topics I am going to talk about.

Enjoy the rest of the week!