What a Tool!

So, lately I have been interested in learning more about the tools that are out there to help me increase the productivity of our rather small team. After a little searching I stumbled onto http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ , this was a great source for new and interesting tools to support .NET development. As I Scanned through the offerings I saw there were toys for everyone. I thought that since I had a budget of little or none there would be just about that much offered to me. I was sure wrong about that… There are Code Metrics and Code analysis tools to help me ensure we have as high quality a product as possible, there are documenting tools for the members of the development team, there are even a few toys for the LINQ enthusiasts among us.

I am going to break my evaluation of these tools in to the above suggested 3 categories. First Management, then tools to assist in everyday development, and last things that were just neat toys but not all that useful.

FxCop
Type: Management
Source: Microsoft
Download URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429476(VS.80).aspx
Price: free

FxCop is actually the utility that started this whole adventure, I recently read about as a sidebar in an article in one of the many .net developer oriented magazines. I did a quick search and found it available from our good friends in Redmond. It holds itself out as a rules based code analysis tool. Out of the box it comes preloaded with rules near and dear to the folks at Microsoft, it included more of their standards than I ever knew existed.

After downloading it and kicking the tires a bit I proceeded to turn it loose on our departments most recently deployed application. In no time it had a few suggestions to offer. By a few I mean 5000, and when I say suggestions, that is what they actually were. The application offered suggestions as to how to bring each warning into compliance. It reported on unused variables, anything that did not meet the .Net guidelines for naming, tense, even using a dictionary to make sure variables had a name that made since.

For my money, this is a great application to ensure that everyone working on the project stays on track, I plan to run it at regular intervals ensuring no other application gets so far out of spec, because in the end, we all want code that is as standardized as possible; it is just easier to support.

Next to be evaluated: Source Monitor 2