Visual Studio Spell Checker – A couple of years ago, I had to create an application for a German company. Along with using localisation to create the German/English translation, spell checking that sucker was a challenge.

There were well over a few hundred text strings and many of these were stored in code. Nevertheless, we made it through after a long and tedious development. Suffice to say that developers aren’t the best of spell checkers.

Well now there is help on the horizon. Visual Studio Spell Checker is a free add-in available on the Visual Studio Gallery and supports Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2010.

Visual Studio Spell Checker – Get It Now

Head on over to the link above, download and install Visual Studio Spell Checker.

Alternatively you can fire up your copy of Visual Studio and head on over to the Tools Menu | Extension Manager.

Select the Online Gallery on the left of the Extension Manager screen.

You can then search for Visual Studio Spell Checker. It should however be close to one of the first results in the list.

Clicking on the download button, begins the installation process.

After installing Visual Studio Spell Checker, you will need to restart the IDE.

When Visual Studio has restarted, head on over to the Tools Menu | Spell Checker | Edit Configuration.

Here you can tweak the behaviour of the Spell Checker slightly.

Taking Visual Studio Spell Checker for a spin is easy. Just misspell something. The tool immediately kicks into gear, underlining the misspelt word.

You can now select the correction from the drop down suggestion list below the word.

Ok, so I don’t know about you but pink just isn’t my colour. It feels too happy when I make a mistake. For a bit more doom and gloom, you can change the colour of the underline link. Navigate to Tools | Options | Environment | Fonts and Colours. Under the Display items, select the ‘Spelling Error’ item. You can then change the colour. I changed mine to black.

Back in the code window, you will see a suitably miserable underlined misspelt word.

There may be times when you will want to add a word to the dictionary. This is especially true for slang or local language or terms. (And yes, my ‘misspelt’ word in the image above is actually a word used in Afrikaans and English)

Simply enough, click on the correction suggestions list and Add the word to the dictionary.

Heading back to your Spell Checker Configuration screen, you will see all the user dictionary words you have added. From here you can easily remove a word should you want to.

This is one of the most useful extensions I have found in a long while. It works really very well and should be part of every developers Visual Studio installation. By the way, for those curious few… this is what Potjiekos looks like.