You don't have to pay for everything you want. There are a lot of free tools out there that will may your life better. Obviously, when I get a free tool I don't look at the price. What I do look for is useful functionality, simple installation, a quick start and whether the tool fits with the way I work. I find that I'm more willing ignore "fit and finish" issues with a free tool.
Smart Paster is a good example. It's a tool that I use a lot. I'm constantly pasting strings into my programs and formatting them to work as string values. For C# this means breaking long strings up to concatenate them together and adding the @ prefix. Smart Paster adds a Paste As... option to the popup menu when you right mouse click in an editor window. If you pick the String choice in a C# file, this is what you get:
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/16/20105 comments
After reviewing the enterprise version of dynaTrace and recovering from sticker shock, I was intrigued by the free version of the product: dynaTrace Java Edition. There's a number of freeware tools that I've added to my copy of Visual Studio and this looked like a potentially useful addition. I discussed the role that the free version plays in dynaTrace's marketing strategy earlier in a recent blog post.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/16/20101 comments
Welcome to the ToolTracker blog at Visual Studio Magazine. Starting this month, we're going to be doing a lot of interesting things in this space.
First, this blog is an opportunity for me to provide more background on the tools we review in the VS Toolbox section of Visual Studio Magazine. Unfortunately, we've got a limited amount of space to work with in print, and there's always great information that we are forced to leave out as a result. The ToolTracker blog enables me to post observations and thoughts as I'm developing each the review. This has two benefits: the fun of watching me shoot myself in the foot while working with a new product, and the insight readers gain as they learn what we look for in a product.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/01/20100 comments
Altova Gets After Your XML
You know that XML has taken over your life when tools for managing the integration of all of your XML resources start appearing: Altova's Schema Agent is a tool for seeing the relationships between schemas and XML documents (including WSDL files and XSLT stylesheets) to create imports, includes, and redefines.
AvePoint Boosts SharePoint Development
While support for SharePoint improves in Visual Studio 2010, AvePoint's products continue to supply support that developers can't get from Visual Studio. AvePoint's Deployment Manager, for instance, helps you move sites from test to production, and Migrator will help you move your existing sites to SharePoint 2010.
PostView: dynaTrace Enterprise 3.2
In mid-March dynaTrace released version 3.2 of their Enterprise product. You can check out our
February review of dynaTrace Enterprise 3.1, which we liked despite the high price. New enhancements include the ability to cross thread boundaries (trace into a Worker/background thread) and more memory diagnostics (including how much memory is being held by a single object). Some typical analysis tasks are now automated, making it easier to find, for instance, your five slowest transactions. There's also now a REST interface to automate control of the tool.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 03/31/20100 comments
When I think about a software development tool, I think of something that works with or alongside Visual Studio. But now that you can upgrade to the latest version of Visual Studio while still using your current version of .NET, shouldn't Visual Studio be considered "just another tool" for .NET developers?
In an upcoming issue we're planning to review Visual Studio 2010 and, at least in part, we'll be thinking about it as a "tool review."
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 03/31/20100 comments