During this session we discussed the use of and importance of various "Performance Enhancing Tools". Participants were invited and encouraged to share their favorite tools, and I think we all got to hear about something new. Thanks to those of you who attended and participated.
The notes are somewhat scattered, almost stream-of-thought-esque, but hey, I was typing them as we went. Feel free to jump in and help edit it up a bit. Within the next week or so, I will try to come back through and add links to appropriate places.
Important to use a refactoring tool. Claudio says it doesn't matter whether you use CodeRush or Resharper, but use it
Use the cheat sheet and training videos!
What is the difference between the refactoring tools?
- Lot of overlap
- Coderush has the better templates
- Code suggestions in Resharper, Claudio says it's present in CodeRush now
Redgate seems to be the general concensus as a favorite for SQL tools (Diffing databases, refactoring, and intellisense)
DevExpress:
- Provides good skinning, ribbon controls, etc
- Good documentation and support
Infragisics
- Support and documentation is lacking
- Feature set is okay, but heavy.
Telerik:
- Glowing recommendation for Telerik Ajax from Scott
Mono and SharpDevelop
- A little feature light, but good performance and good IDE
Textmate or E:
- Excellent tool for HTML development (according to Ben)
- Would like to see some of the quick development abailities in Visual Studio
Unit Testing:
- Resharper gave JP an AHA moment for TDD
- TestDriven.Net - Test any public method
- Noone likes MSTest.
SlickRun
- Ben maps this to Windows+Q
- Replaces the Run Menu or Start Menu
Launchy
- Indexes your start menu. Use it to run stuff quickly without hunting.
Web Browser Stuff:
- Chrome is slick for AJAX stuff
- Firebug is still better than Chrome for web debugging
- Debug JavaScript
- Variables
- Step-through
- One flaw: Timing can go wonky if you're breaking in the middle of a script
- IE8 dev tools are supposed to be awesome, maybe even better than Firebug, but no first-hand knowledge to this.
Source Control:
- VisualSVN - $49
- Tortoise - Free
- Subversion - Free; Integrates with VS
- Perforce
- TFS is okay for what it is, but if you just want source control, use something else.
- Edit\Merge\Commit vs. Library Metaphor
- TFS and Perforce use a Library metaphor. You can see what other people are working on, but there is "check out overhead"
- Others use Edit\Merg\Commit, which takes less overhead, but you don't really know what other people are working on
- GIT
- This is an interesting technology in that it is entirely distributed. Clone\Push metaphor. Everyone has the full history of the project.
- MSYSGit, MSYSGit-GUI, cygwin
Performance Profilers:
- DotTrace from Jetbrains
- ANTS profiler from RedGate
- SciTech.Net memory profiler
- DevPartner has a free one but it is "hokey" (Ben's comment :-) )
- nHibernate
Automation Tools:
- Writing scripts to bring your computer up to date can save time.
CruiseControl just had a new version released. Sounds exciting!
Tail.Exe
- Text viewer - especially good for log file always stays at the bottom (or tail) of the log file
Comments (1)
joe reynolds said
at 12:10 pm on Apr 4, 2009
we did not touch on code generation, so feel free to add your thoughts here!
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