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:
@"Smart Paster is a good example. " +
@"It's a tool that I use a lot. "
In Visual Basic you get the line continuation characters:
"Smart Paster is a good example. " & _
"It's a tool that I use a lot. "
You can customize how long your strings will be.
But wait, there's more! The other paste operation I do with strings is to create a StringBuilder. There's a menu choice for that, too. When you do a StringBuilder paste, you need to provide the name of your variable and this is what you get:
Dim sbArticleText As New StringBuilder(421)
sbArticleText.AppendFormat("Smart Paster is a good example.")
sbArticleText.AppendFormat("It's a tool hat I use a lot")
The tool even handles escaping embedded quotes. What are my complaints? A minor one: The choices that I use are on a submenu and I wish they were directly on the popup menu. A second minor complaint: I wish that double quotes were handled by replacing them with single quotes -- it would make it easier to paste XML into string constants.
My biggest issue is installing the package. The Visual Studio 2008 version is only available as source code and comes without installation instructions. Get your version here, which provides a compiled version and instructions on how to install it (you have to extract a zip file to the right place). This is one of those "fit and finish" issues that I'm willing to overlook in a free tool.
You can also paste into a Region and as a comment but I've never used them.
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.
dynaTrace provides tracing capabilities for your .NET (or Java) applications -- following a thread of execution across multiple tiers, classes and threads (with version 3.2). It also costs $10,000.
dynaTrace Ajax Edition does something simpler: track the thread of execution through JavaScript code executing in Internet Explorer. Purportedly, dynaTrace will even handle tracing asynchronous calls to Web Services, allowing you to see how much of your response time is being eaten by your browser and how much is eaten by calling a server-side process.
I had downloaded version 1.4 some time ago, but hadn't gotten around to using it. I decided that I should get the latest version (1.6) from http://ajax.dynatrace.com/pages/. But, after returning to the site and logging in (you have to register to get the download) I was told that I didn't have permission to access the resource.
Fortunately, I take rejection well (hey, I used to date). I decided to stick with version 1.4. I also took advantage of the benefits of working for Visual Studio Magazine: I sent an e-mail to the marketing guy I worked with on the original review of the Enterprise product. It's entirely possible that I can't have the free edition because I still have my review copy of the full version installed. I'll find out.
Installing dynaTrace is a snap, and it adds a new menu choice to your Start menu. Note that this product does not integrate with Visual Studio. If you're interested in the kind of code you can trace, you can look at the sample app I used in my article on jQuery and subsequently extended over a series of Practical ASP.NET columns.
By the way: As soon as I started dynaTrace, it informed me that a new version was available and asked if I wanted to download it. I clicked the link in the dialog, taking me to the dynaTrace site where I tried downloading the application again. The site still wouldn't let me have the latest version.
A guy can get an inferiority complex from this kind of constant rejection. I'll soldier on with version 1.4.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/16/20101 comments
Check out my quick review of a free tool: dynTrace Ajax Edition, which lets you see where your JavaScript code is spending its time. We also reviewed the full version of dynaTrace in some depth in February.
The full version of dynaTrace isn't cheap (prices start at $10,000), so the gap between the two editions is, well, steep. I spoke with Eric Senunas, senior director of Marketing and Communications at dynaTrace, about the relationship between the two products.
Eric said the first goal of the product was to give developers something they would love... and do it for free. It was also important that the tool not be crippled, a timed trial, or limited in any way.
dynaTrace decided that something developers would love was to give developers visibility into their JavaScript executing in the browser. By using dynaTrace, Eric said, all of a sudden developers can spot their problems and say, "I can fix this and this." Eric added that, because dynaTrace Ajax Edition also shows the time between when a call is made to the network and the result comes back, the tool gives developers a view into their network activity
The evidence says that dynaTrace succeeded: the tool has had over ten thousand downloads in the four months since it was made available. dynaTrace also discovered that giving developers something they love creates its own demands on the company. The current version of the tool only works with Internet Explorer, so developers have been demanding a version for FireFox.
Of course, dynaTrace was hoping that the tool would generate marketing opportunities. All by themselves the downloads provide the marketing department with direction: multiple downloads from the same company suggest a potential customer that dynaTrace can follow up with.
Eric also pointed out that the ability to pinpoint where to fix things using dynaTrace Ajax Edition stops at the browser. When developers realize they need to fix things at the server, Eric added, the hope is that developer will start saying, "I need dynaTrace on the server!" Which, of course, is good for sales.
I also spoke with Eric about what dynaTrace sees happening in the development tool space and how dynaTrace seeks to succeed there. I'll have that in a later blog.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/16/20100 comments
Back in the September 2009 issue of Visual Studio Magazine I reviewed the ReSharper code productivity utility. The next month I looked at its competitor, CodeRush.
Perversely, though 60 percent of my software development is in Visual Basic, I actually use ReSharper, despite the fact that it provides much more support for C# than it does for VB. (CodeRush, in contrast, treats both languages similarly.) More proof that there's no accounting for taste, I suppose.
However, since the review, I've run into a problem with ReSharper when creating Visual Studio Add-ins. When you test an Add-in, Visual Studio launches a second copy of itself where you can debug your Add-in. It turns out this drives ReSharper nuts (I've no idea how CodeRush would do) and ties Visual Studio into knots.
I had to uninstall ReSharper until I finished the project. I suppose that I could have contacted technical support for a solution or work around but it I decided that it would be simpler just to uninstall, finish the project, and reinstall ReSharper.
Have you been working with ReSharper? Any thoughts on working around the add-in issue?
-Peter Vogel
Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/02/20102 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.
Second, this blog gives us space to talk about the tools industry in general. I'm opinionated enough to want to share my view on the tools available to me as a developer, but I'm also curious enough to want to know more. We're going to be use this blog to bring you interviews with participants in the tools industry, as well as analysts who observe the dev space. I'll also provide news about what's happening with the tools you use.
Third, this blog is an opportunity to get what you want from Visual Studio Magazine. Who should we be talking to and who would you like to hear from? What tools are you interested in seeing reviewed? What are the issues you want discussed in a review? Where did we go wrong in a previous review? I'm planning to use this blog to help me go back and update earlier reviews, for instance. Your comments and input will make all the difference here.
Fourth (and finally), we offer you a look ahead at what tools we're going to be reviewing. Next up in our review window is Telerik's ASP.NET AJAX RadControls, for instance. What would you want to know about the Telerik package? I'm also planning to review useful freeware tools. What do you use? What are you considering adding to your toolkit but aren't sure about? You can provide your comments below.
-Peter Vogel
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.
If you're using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, you should find much improved integration with Visual Studio -- something I thought wasn't quite good enough in version 3.1.
It's the Data, StupidIt's all about the data, dummy: As Silverlight 3 and 4 improve Silverlight's function set for business applications, more attention is being paid to supporting data displays in Silverlight applications. Instersoft rolled out Intersoft Presenter and Intersoft DataSource in February, aimed at retrieving data and managing its display in Silverlight.
-Peter Vogel
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."
So what do you want to know about Visual Studio 2010? What are you worried about? What do you want tested? Let me know by posting in the comments below!
-Peter Vogel
Posted by Peter Vogel on 03/31/20100 comments