Top 10 ASP.NET Tools
Lately I have been seeing several list of must have tools for .NET developers. I thought I would throw my hat in the ring too. I actually use these tools, so they are not just pulling from other list, but I may have found them from similar list over the years. Now if I could just get my clients to adopt these tools the world would be an easier place.
Chris Love's Top 10 .NET Development Tools
- Code Smith - The best customizable code generation tool out there. It is not limited to just .NET code you can generate anything that relies upon text as its source. I must have generated 500,000 of solid code with it over the past 2 years. My best friend finally got it approved the other day and he had to call me to tell me about his exploits!.
- Developer Fusion - Has a real nice set of online utilities. I personally use the language conversion all the time when I am converting code from VB to C# and C# to VB. It works great on about 95% of the code I pass it. I have had problems with it understanding Generics and IsNothing calls.
- Fiddler - An Internet Explorer Ad-In, allows you to see the header and other important information about each request. I personally use it to track down performance bottlenecks and sometimes missing information or bad data being posted to my pages. It acts as a local proxy that each web request passes through, this give Fiddler full access to the incoming and outgoing streams. I think there are a few new similar add-ins that have been release lately, but I have not had a chance to test them yet.
- RegExLib - One of the best regular expression sites for .NET developers. You can test your expressions and search through the archive of expressions other developers have posted.
- OnTime - AxoSoft's OnTime project tracking software offers me a great way to see where I am with a project. I can add feature request, bugs and update where I am with each one as I make progress during the day. It also allows me to see how much time I think something will take and how long it actually took. The only problem I have is I am not the best at putting the time in to keep everything up to date. I recently had to work with a competing product at a client's and I have to tell you it was much more expensive and offered a small fraction of the capabilities that OnTime offers, check it out.
- Power Toys - Make the experience in Visual Studio even better.
- Regulazy and Regulator - Roy Osherove's easy to use regular expression editors. I just can not imagine my life with out them now.
- LogParser - This is invaluable when you need to analyze any sort of large data that is not in a SQL Server.
- Enterprise Library - Every .NET developer should use at least 2-3 of these blocks in their applications. I plan a long series of how to use various aspects of the Enterprise library in the coming months.
- SysInternals - Tools every computer geek should have and use and they are 100% Free!
Sorry it took me so long to actually post this entry. I wanted to do as good a job analyzing some tools as I could. There are many others I have found useful and will continue to add to my list.