Tools are the equipments that reduce human effort and every day, we use different tools to make our lives easier. Same applies to .NET developers. There are many tools out there. In this article, I will talk about some of the useful tools that .NET developers should keep in mind when building, testing, debugging, and deploying their .NET applications.
Let us see some of the best tools that .net development project team needs and their benefits. These tools encompass many categories, some of them are meant for best practices, some of them are for validating the data or code, some of them are for checking security threats or some of them are used to review the code.
Let’s see some of these tools.
Resharper
Resharper is a plug in to Visual Studio which gives suggestions for code improvement. It gives the facilities of code refactoring, code formatting, and automatically generates the code of property methods, variables, and suggestions for improving the used codes. The best thing is it shows warnings for developers when the code looks wrong and it improves developer’s thinking too.
log4net
Log4net is the tool used for writing logging in the code. It has the option to log error, warning, exceptions to log files and is very easy to configure. It is fast, multiple logging targets, dynamic xml configurations and thread safe.
Fiddler
Fiddler is used to check the request and response in the communication channels. It is very useful when there is no debugging through visual studio. I use this tool to debug the remote WCF and WEB API. We can change the request information and check the response sent from the server using this tool.
ANTS profiler
ANTS Memory Profiler is one of the tools used to find memory leaks in .NET applications easily. It has a great feature of checking memory usage in code and optimizing the memory usage of your C# and VB.NET code.
NCover
Ncover is a great tool to help test driven development. Most test driven development looks for coverage of all the source code. Ncover detects the code and suggest where we have missed the test cases for code. Higher code coverage gives high values to the product.
.NET Reflector
The main functionality of .NET Reflector is to disassemble the source code. You can browse the source code by clicking on a function name and check easily which code is contained by the dll. In production deployed code if we want to check the version of code we can easily check the source code by using .net reflector.
FXCOP
FxCop is a tool where we can incorporate a predefined set of rules, create our own custom rules, naming conventions, avoid to write bad code. It has the feature to make the build unsuccessful until its rules are satisfied. It gives the benefits of writing good coding standards.
Code collaborator
It is the best tool for reviewing the code. The tool provides a great support to url based source control wherein we can upload the code and reviewer can review the code, put the comments. Later on the code author can fix it and again ask for review.
APPScan
It is a tool given by IBM which checks the security threats in the web applications. It checks a sample end-to-end user activity (By recording) and analyze the source code by its internal mechanism . Most common error related to security like SQL injection, Cross site scripting, cookie stealing, sensitive data exposure and DOS attack and provides the security threats in a report.
Development team uses this tool to find the security issues and fixes these issues before final product release.
JSON Viewer
This tool is used to check validity of the JSON data or converting object data to JSON or JSON to object.
NAnt
NAnt is a free and open source software tool for automating software build processes. It is best fit for .NET development project to make a build process.
All the tools are not free, some of them are free and some of them need a license. Choosing the business need and license cost is the key parameter for the development project team. Nuget package also comes with many tools which can be validated before purposing a tool which needs a license cost. Hope you also start using this tool. Thanks for reading.