Let Me Report

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I have been programming for more than a decade now. Over these years, I began to realize that there are some tools that I can't live without. These tools not only increase my productivity but also make my job a lot easier. For past several years, roughly 8, I have been working with MSFT technologies, mostly C# and ASP.NET based applications with SQL Server as the database. During initial days of DotNet(2001), I wrote some custom tools to avoid repetition, do code comparison and fine tune my coding. Later on, I was able to find some products that were very powerful than what I had built custom. Without wasting any more time, I made some switch to these products. So here they are and lets get to them.

1. CodeSmith

I strongly believe that if I have to code same thing again and again, it is bad for me and for the company. I always look for something that can solve this problem. During the last few years, increased use of design patterns has become very common. Applying design patterns can be time consuming, especially generating datalayer(model) and other objects like controller and some forms can take forever. We used to do all that manually and time to do that would account for more than 30% of the budget. Instead of wasting time on these trivial tasks, programmers should spend time that matters the most. What CodeSmith brings to the table is that a robust visual-studio-like IDE to create templates that can generate tons and tons of code within minutes. You can configure these templates to not only generate datalayer or backend classes but generate custom user controls. CodeSmith IDE is very simple and easy to work with. For more information, check out http://www.codesmithtools.com/.

2. SQL Compare (RedGate ToolBelt)

It is always a pain to maintain different development environment(dev, test, qa, prod etc). I have worked with companies that had 5 environments. Doing builds on these environment isn't easy and can be extremely time consuming. Two years ago, one of the developers I work with, told me that he lost the change log for database schema due to hardware failure. We tried to recover it but didn't have any success. We were a day away from our deployment and chances of delaying the project deployment would hurt the company at this stage. I started researching a tool that will compare these environments. I tried few but finally downloaded Redgate, at that time, offered a 30-day trial to use their toolset. Without wasting any further time, I downloaded their app called SQL Compare and ran the comparison wizard. Within 10 minutes, I had all the tables, storedprocs differences. I lobbied in my company to get atleast one license of this software. For more information, check out http://www.redgate.com

3. DiffDog (Altova)

File comparison isn't anything new but DiffDogg takes it to the next level. It allows you to visually compare, merge text or source code using a simple visual interface. It also provides advanced XML-aware differencing and editing capabilities. Best part about DiffDogg is that it lets you compare directories. For a web developer, this tool is a blessing because they maintain tons of development environment(test, qa, prod, dev etc). DiffDog can easily lets you do that. For more information, check out http://www.altova.com/

My list didn't end here. I still have some more tools to discuss. I will be posting part 2 of this topic soon.

WebDevelopment