7 Tools for .NET

NDoc 2.0 (Free)

Using NDoc 2.0 you can easily generate a compiled help file or a Web site that documents your assemblies and presents them MSDN-style. The tool provides many features to customize the output and create professional-looking documentation. You can configure the headers, footer, title, copyright information and more with NDoc 2.0.

ReSharper 3.0 ($199)

This tool provides more than a dozen productivity enhancers in one utility. As its name suggests, the product began as a refactoring tool for C#. The latest version now supports VB.NET as well, and includes a total of 27 refactoring features for C# and 17 for VB.NET.

It has a feature called Stack Trace Explorer with which you can paste your stack trace into the explorer and the tool will render each stack frame as a link that you can click to jump straight to the corresponding code. The Find Usages feature is several times faster than Visual Studio's Find All References.

ReSharper also supports quick fixes. Suppose your assignment statement is missing a cast. ReSharper will offer to fix the code -- either by inserting the cast or changing the variable type. You can use ReSharper to format code according to your style guidelines with a single keystroke. ReSharper provides more intelligent IntelliSense than Visual Studio by filtering the selections based on the expected type. These features are just the tip of the iceberg -- if you'd like to increase your coding productivity, you need to try this tool.

Pattern Expert ($79)

This utility has a single purpose: to teach programmers how to implement design patterns in code. While this may classify more as a tutorial aid than a development tool, the fundamentals that it aims to teach ultimately motivate developers to write significantly better code, making it arguably the best kind of development tool available.

Reflector (Free)

Reflector lets you examine the contents of any .NET assembly. With it, you can browse an assembly's types, meta data, Intermediate Language (IL) instructions, resources and XML documentation. This makes it an excellent tool for studying the inner workings of any compiled assembly, including third-party tools and the .NET base class libraries themselves. These capabilities can help when troubleshooting problems that may lie in components for which no source code is available. Reflector works with all versions of the .NET Framework, and the latest version of this tool supports LINQ query expressions and other concepts introduced in .NET 3.5.

Outlook Redemption ($199)

This library offers the best object model yet for programmatically accessing mailboxes and their folders, mail items, appointments, etc. Perhaps the most compelling feature is its ability to bypass the warning dialogs raised by the Security Patch introduced since Office 2000 SP2. This makes it ideal for unattended service applications that need to talk to an Exchange store. Plus, Internet headers and extended properties (many of which are difficult or impossible to extract using MAPI or CDO) are all fully exposed and available through the object model.

RegexDesigner.NET (Free)

The best feature is the code generator, which will automatically create source code (in either VB.NET or C#) that implements your regular expression for either match, replace or split operations. The generated code for match operations includes check for match, get match, get matches, numbered groups and named groups. You can also compile your regular expressions directly to an assembly, which you can then reference from your application or reuse across multiple applications.

Fiddler (Free)

Fiddler is a debugging proxy, meaning that it situates itself in the pipeline so that all network traffic flows through it. It can therefore easily intercept and expose all HTTP requests and responses between client and server. The tool earns its name by giving you the ability to "fiddle" with the network conversation that's taking place. For example, you can build a handcrafted request, or drag/drop a previous session request, and then optionally tweak values before executing it. There's also support for breakpoints and single-step debugging, which pause and resume HTTP traffic while permitting edits during execution.