Ultimate .NET Development Tools 2010 Edition

Here is my updated 2010 list of development tools that I prefer to use when doing .NET development.  I specifically do not include any third party control/report libraries.

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] MindScape LightSpeed as my Object-Relational-Mapper.  NHibernate is the best free alternative I’m aware of. 
21. [UT]* Reflector to drill down to the guts of any code library (also check-out the nice plug-ins)
22. [UT] Silverlight Spy to dissect any Silverlight application.
23. [UT] RegexBuddy for managing those difficult regular expressions.  Regulator is the best, free alternative I know of. 
24. [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.
25. [UT]* Fiddler to debug all your HTTP traffic in IE.   Also see the neXpert plugin for monitoring performance problems.
26. [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.
27. [CA]* FxCop to enforce .NET coding guidelines
28. [CA] NDepend to get all the static code metrics I'd ever want
29. [CA] ANTS Profiler for performance and memory profiling
30. [MD] Enterprise Architect to do UML Modelling and Model Driven Design if required. Alternatively use Visio with these simple templates. 
31. [MD]* FreeMind as mind mapping tool
32. [TC]* ScrewTurn Wiki for team collaboration
33. [QA]* Eviware soapUI for functional and load testing of SOA web services
34. [QA]* Telerik WebAii Testing Framework for automated regression testing of Web 2.0 apps
35. [DP]* Windows Installer XML (WiX) for creating Windows Installers

Threading in C# – Free E-book Updated

This is just a quick post to highlight the fact that Joseph Albahari, author of the excellent LINQPad and C# 4.0 In A Nutshell book, has recently updated hits free Threading in C# e-book.  The e-book contains some really great, concise content on all the latest threading related topics in .NET.  The latest version includes coverage of new .NET 4.0 constructs like ThreadLocal<T> and Lazy<T> as well as a whole chapter dedicated to the new Parallel Programming extensions to the .NET framework.  Highly recommended!

Log4View – Getting the most out of your log4net/log4j log files

If you are using log4net or log4j for writing log files, do yourself a favour and get the whole team and production support a copy of Log4View as soon as possible.  It really is a wonderful tool that sits on top of your log4net or log4j files to give you a birds-eye view on what’s happening in your application.  Need to monitor your servers remotely as they are running?  No problem, just add a reference to their TCP log appender that allows you to configure log4net to log all statements to a TCP port.  This gives you the flexibility of remotely monitoring the server as the application is running in production (providing you open the port on the firewall of course). 

One of the most powerful features IMO is the grouping feature in the message view.  Look at the following screenshot that shows how easy it is to group messages according to session id/thread id or any other custom log information added to your log files.  Simply drag the columns you want to group by into the Group By area above the grid:

This specific grouping allows us to easily inspect the separate requests associated with a certain user in the system. Highly recommended!

RunSharp – IL Generation for Dummies

We’ve been doing some interesting work the past 2-3 weeks on creating a Rule Engine for our company’s flagship product, On Key.  The Rule Engine needs to evaluate rules entered by the end user at run-time according to our pre-defined grammar to determine a true/false answer.  This allows us tremendous flexibility in that end-users are able to specify under which conditions certain actions should occur within the system.  The main requirements for the technical solution was that it should be as quick as possible but it also has to cater for rules being changed at run-time by the end-users.  

Before heading off to create our own custom solution, we did some research to consider possible solutions to solving the same kind of problem.  Some of the solutions we came across were:

1. Flee
2. NCalc
3. Irony
4. Dynamic method generation using Expression Trees 

After looking at all of these solutions, we decided to rather create our own to give us the ultimate control and flexibility over extending the Rule Engine going forward.  Setting up the grammar using the excellent ANTLR and ANTLRWorks was quite easy to do.  ANTLR takes care of generating the C# code that will do the lexing, parsing and type checking of the rules entered by the user.  Thereafter we moved onto the run-time evaluation/compilation of the rules represented in the Abstract Syntax Tree created by ANTLR.  For this purpose, we created 3 tree walkers/visitors on our AST to compare against each other:

1. Interpreter – Evaluate the rules dynamically as we walk the AST
2. C# Code Generator – Walk the tree and generate C# code that is compiled using the C# compiler into an assembly
3. IL Code Generator – Walk the tree and generate dynamic IL code in memory

C# Coding Standards Using ReSharper

I found the following great blog post by Tim Lloyd on how to setup coding standards for your development environment using ReSharper 5.0.  We’ve done pretty much the same thing in our environment although I wasn’t aware of the ReSharper Settings Manager which I will test drive soon as I have found sharing settings between team members to be a real pain.  Seems like JetBrains will look at this for v6 though.  Things we are doing in addition to the content mentioned by Tim are:

1. Using Agent Smith to ensure the correctness of the spelling for our resource files etc.
2. Created a more advanced layout template to order all our code using the same structure when doing Code Cleanup

It works great if everybody in the team follows the agreed upon procedure.  I find that this makes code reviews focus on the right things – the actual business logic!