My Ultimate .NET Development Tools 2010 Edition

Here is my 2010 updated list of development tools that I prefer to use when doing .NET development.  I specifically decided to not include any third party control/report libraries.  I focus instead on the tools that assist me in crafting high-quality code quickly and effectively.

Categories

• IDE = Develop/generate/refactor code within the VS IDE or separate IDE
• SCM = Software Configuration Management (Source Control etc.)
• TDD = Test Driven Development
• DBMS = Database Management Systems
• CI = Continuous Integration
• FR = Frameworks (Persistence, AOP, Inversion of Control, Logging etc.)
• UT = Utility Tools
• CA = Code Analysis (Static + Dynamic)
• TC = Team Collaboration (Bug tracking, Project management etc.)
• MD = Modelling
• QA = Testing Tools
• DP = Deployment (Installations etc.)

 

Tools

* = free/open source

1. [IDE] Visual Studio 2010 Premium Edition
2. [IDE] ReSharper for refactoring, unit test runner and so much more
3. [IDE] CodeSmith for generating code.  Also consider T4 with Clarius’s Visual T4 Editor.  
4. [IDE]* GhostDoc for inserting xml code comments
5. [IDE] Altova Xml Suite for any xml related work.  XmlPad is the best, free alternative I know of.
6. [DBMS] SqlServer 2008 for DBMS
7. [SCM]* Subversion for source control
8. [SCM]* TortoiseSVN as windows shell extension for Subversion
9. [SCM] VisualSVN for integration of TortoiseSVN into VS.  AnkhSVN is the best, free alternative I know of.
10. [SCM]* KDiff3 for merging
11. [TDD]* NUnit as preferred xUnit testing framework
12. [TDD]* moq as mock framework.
13. [TDD] NCover for code coverage stats
14. [CI]* TeamCity as build server
15. [CI]* MSBuild Extension Pack for additional MSBuild tasks.
16. [FR]* log4net as logging framework.  Also see Log4View for an excellent UI for the log files.
17. [FR]* ANTLR and ANTLRWorks for creating custom DSL’s.
18. [FR] PostSharp as Aspect Oriented Programming framework
19. [FR]* Ninject as IoC container
20. [FR]* RunSharp for generating IL at run-time
21. [FR] MindScape LightSpeed as my Object-Relational-Mapper.  NHibernate is the best free alternative I’m aware of. 
22. [UT]* Reflector to drill down to the guts of any code library (also check-out the nice plug-ins)
23. [UT] Silverlight Spy to dissect any Silverlight application.
24. [UT] RegexBuddy for managing those difficult regular expressions.  Regulator is the best, free alternative I know of. 
25. [UT]* LINQPad as a easy way to query SQL databases using LINQ and as a general scratchpad application to test C#/VB.NET code snippets.
26. [UT]* Fiddler to debug all your HTTP traffic in IE.   Also see the neXpert plugin for monitoring performance problems.
27. [UT]* Firebug to assist with testing web applications running in Firefox. Also see YSlow add-on for performance testing and Web Developer add-on for additional Firefox web development tools.
28. [CA]* FxCop to enforce .NET coding guidelines
29. [CA] NDepend to get all the static code metrics I'd ever want
30. [CA] ANTS Profiler for performance and memory profiling
31. [MD] Enterprise Architect to do UML Modelling and Model Driven Design if required. Alternatively use Visio with these simple templates. 
32. [MD]* FreeMind as mind mapping tool
33. [TC]* ScrewTurn Wiki for team collaboration
34. [QA]* Eviware soapUI for functional and load testing of SOA web services
35. [QA]* Telerik WebAii Testing Framework for automated regression testing of Web 2.0 apps
36. [DP]* Windows Installer XML (WiX) for creating Windows Installers