The productivity of the application has an utmost importance in developer’s life and it’s been difficult to write quality and standard code all alone without any help so to ease in this process, tools have been the importance of time to quickly improve our coding standards and it provides us relief by making work easy.
Today, we will discuss the useful .NET Tools that ease in the development process. There are many advantages, some of them are enlisted below:
- Increase performance and productivity
- Make our life easier by helping inside the IDE in a unique way
- Establish an easy workflow to transfer your rough code to productive one
- Help in writing best and standard code
- Generate analysis report of static code
So let’s move to discuss the Tools.
Visual Studio
Visual Studio is a king of IDEs and the essential tool for .NET devs everywhere. Not much else to say except that it has a great starting toolset for any developer and amazing plugin support. The Community edition gives the masses the power of the Professional SKU, for free. Simply amazing and getting better with every release.
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is the Microsoft’s cross-platform IDE has taken the lightweight-yet-extensible text editor world by storm. I use this on my Mac for developing ASP.NET Core apps, writing Markdown files, and just editing plain text files. Has almost totally replaced my use of Notepad++. The plugin system and rapid development turnaround are going to threaten the paid alternatives in a big way (Sublime, I’m looking at you).
Node Package Manager
Node Package Manager is the best tool for installing your command-line dev tools and front-end frameworks. I use it in conjunction with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code to do development across several stacks, including WebForms apps that I support.
NimbleText
NimbleText is the new favorite way to write repetitive code or handle small or large data transformation tasks. I’ve used it from everything from writing HTML to generating SQL insert scripts. Its time-saving power cannot be overstated. And, it’s FREE!
dotPeek
dotPeek is the best way to decompile .NET code, free from JetBrains. It even has the ability to break a .NET DLL/EXE down into a fully-structured Visual Studio project!
PowerShell
PowerShell is the best scripting language on the Windows platform. Great scripting plus the power of the .NET Framework at your disposal when you need those extra awesome features. Also, recently made cross-platform!
Webpac
Bundle all of your JS, CSS, TS, etc files together for delivery to your local friendly web app. I use this on new and old projects alike. Powerful and simple to configure.
OzCode
if you’re a C# developer, you need OzCode. It turns debugging from a necessary chore to a borderline delight. Break down code expressions, highlight the most needed data in an object, compare data between two objects, find all objects of a given type in memory, and exceptional exception handling make OzCode a star – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
GhostDoc
GhostDoc is the best way to quickly write your XML code comments. Makes it so easy to annotate your code with comments about the code you’re writing.
Resharper
Resharper is a Visual Studio extension which can analyze code for quality for all the major flavors ASP.NET, XAML, C#, VB, Typescript, ASP.NET MVC, and XML. It can remove errors and smell the code quality by giving hotfixes at runtime to fix from available options. Refactor on the fly. An extended search for any type of files to methods. Extended intellisense with documentation and hotfixes. Code Standard and Style with formatting options and a lot of more and very exciting features.
dotTrace
dotTrace can detect performance overheads in a different variety fashion. It analyzes the issue and gives a timeline of performance bottlenecks in the form of events like UI Freezes, excessive garbage collection, uneven workload distribution and much more. It also checks the SQL queries for performance and slowness in your application. The best thing is that without leaving your IDE, you can get reports, view performance timelines, analyze call stacks and do many more profiling options.
Elmah
Elmah (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) as the name suggests it is an error logging module for unhandled exceptions, it has one-time web configuration in web.config file and then you start receiving errors as it happens in real time to analyze them in a better fashion.
You can get the following facilities first properly configured:
- Log of nearly all unhandled exceptions
- A web page to remotely view all logged exceptions with details link and full stack trace
- Email of the logged exceptions as it happens also contain the original yellow screen of death error
- An RSS feed of the items
- Export to CSV Facility
- Paging of the error with latest on the top and you can check the previous one also
- Logged exceptions data stored in SQL Table
.Net Reflector
.Net Reflector can give you control over third-party assemblies by decompiling the assemblies and debug to find the code issues quickly. You can get the decompile assembly objects in tree form in object explorer to navigate through into it. Search quickly by in navigating items by typing to find certain objects or items you required for your work.
LINQPad
LINQPad is a .NET Programmers Playground as per company statement and it’s true as it is not for only Linq queries. You can also test any C#/F# or VB code snippets instantly. You can query the linq or SQL. It has a built-in debugger for best user experience.
Postman
Postman is the fantastic app for chrome to send and receive HTTP Requests using postman request builder. You can write your own test cases to validate data. You can test the request either it meets the certain criteria it can show you the graphically good points if certain criteria of the test failed or meet.
SQL Server Profiler
SQL Server Profiler is a very useful tool to analyze the issues either the slow SQL queries or stored procedures or enable the traces to find out the certain issues by analyzing the trace results in a file. The trace saved in the form as a result of events fired.
Benefits
- Step to the problems to find out the issue scenario
- Find and fix slow running queries
- Capture the events to diagnose the problem
Fiddler
Fiddler is a free tool to view and debug the HTTP Requests in your machine. The best thing about fiddler is that it can support all browsers to debug and trace the traffic. It also supports all the systems either on Mac, Windows or Linux also it supports any platform from.NET, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby on rails. It has many companion tools which can work with Fiddler to extend the functionality by geolocating the requests. Fiddler Core which can be integrated into the .NET Application to provide vast functionality.
Web Essentials
Web Essentials is a Visual Studio extension and it extends the VS functionality by adding new features which are required for many years. The features like extended VS shortcuts for tasks made life easier with extended IntelliSense and HTML/Css/Js minification for best productivity.
Productivity Power
Productivity Power Tools is a VS extension that offers extended features for best productivity and it is provided with best built-in tools to make life easier.
Features of Productivity Power Tools
- Peek helps let you open peek context definition inline the editor to show the definition from Microsoft library you can navigate to the peek as well.
- Solution Error Visualizer can help to get the detailed view of the error in your solution explorer tree by highlighting the file and hover over the file show the detail of the warning and error.
- Filtering is a nice feature now you can filter those files which contain either errors or warnings by clicking on the drop-down in the solution explorer toolbar.
- Built in options to on and off the features you require.
- Structure Visualizer lets you check the scope of the class or method in which you are working… just hover over the working line to know about the parent.
- Time stamp on the output window with debug information.
- GO to definition is a hefty task to do by pointing the mouse and then click on F12 and then you can view the definition in new window instead but by using the productivity tools, you can do this with ease all to do the power suite make definitions as a link so that by Click + Hover show the peek definition of the method in the same page in which you are working.
- Line compression lets compress the empty space line so that it can be vertically shown adorable in the editor.
- Quick Tasks option let you do the task like on or offline numbers, increase font size, on & off word wrap.
Newton Soft JSON.net
Newton Soft JSON.net is a popular json framework for.NET. It is free and open source and runs anywhere to all .NET supported family devices.
Features
- Serialize and deserialize Json with the power of Json.Net
- Query Json like Xpath syntax
- Very high performance as compared to JavascriptSerializer and dataContractJavascriptSerializer
- XML Support is available
CodeRush
CodeRush is an excellent Productivity Tool from DevExpress. It helps you to code at a fast pace, refactor fastly, run test cases and fix the bugs and errors faster than ever before.
Features
- Built-in decompiler
- Fast development with automatic declarations (class, method, property and lot of more)
Powerful clipboard tools - Built-in deep static code analysis features to analyze code for bugs and errors
- Best code formatting and cleanup features
- Best code visualization tools
NuGet
Nuget is the package manager. The client allows to produce and consume packages. The NuGet gallery is the collection where all the authors share their packages in a repository. When you add certain libraries using NuGet package manager, it adds the required files to the solution and adds references, config settings and changes the other files as needed and when removed, it removes all the references.
NCrunch
NCrunch is automated and concurrent testing tool for Visual Studio. It is the best tool as it runs test without saving and runs tests while you write your line of code. Besides automated testing, it gives you other useful information like performance metrics and code coverage.
Features
- Supports automatic and concurrent testing while you Type inside your IDE.
- Code Coverage gives you suggestions about your line of code by adding markers and other signs to show for an exception as well and it also let you know either test fail or pass with color markers of green and red.
- Performance Metrics lets you know about every line of a test under test with execution time so that you have a better idea of what going on.
- Inline Exception Details can inform you about the exception originate during running tests so that you can get a better idea.
- Small Memory Footprint uses your small amount of memory and do big and supported for solutions having thousands of line of code.
- You can change the automated test run to manual as per your easiness.
NDepend
NDepend is a VS Extension and productivity tool. It has a powerful engine for static code analysis. It has wide range of features to analyze the code base.
Features
- You can use it to analyze the code quality by using code rules.
- Trend Monitoring lets you know the deep insight all about your code with a trend like the line of code, line of code violating the rules and even you can write custom trends.
- You can compare builds and code files.
- Provide best insight and analytics into your application.
- It provides valuable information about your build health like assembly versioning issue, assembly conflicts and PDB file issues.
- It is easy to install and it does not code base quality.
- It’s fast and lightweight and integrates with all versions of Visual Studio.
Conclusion
The best point about these tools is that they all had made the life of a developer easy by their excellent features.
For more information in detail about.Net Development Tools, please drop an email to info@oditeksolutions.com
