What is that single action you do over and over again during your development time?
What task eats your development time like nothing else?
What is the task you want to perform, but you never convince yourself to do, because it would take forever to accomplish?
Please, provide environment information relevant to the task you mention:
I would like to automate the responses when my boss asks for the fifth time today if that bug is fixed.
Automatically re-synchronizing and recompiling every project/solution I'm working with every morning.
Right now it's a by-hand process with MKS and VS2005.
Finding duplicates in the bug tracker.
On large projects, when a lot of testers are involved, a lot of bugs are submitted. During triage you often encounter bugs that you've encountered before. Finding those bugs in the huge repository is difficult as testers sometimes use different terminology for the same concepts.
It doesn't eat up THAT much of my time, but one task I'd like to see automated is converting /* ... / comments to // comments inside of methods. People often send me large codebases to debug, and they're invariable strewn with / ... */ comments everywhere which makes it annoying to comment out blocks of code during my troubleshooting.
C++/Visual Studio 2008
We use MS Communicator in our intranet.
It does not support logging of conversations.
I want my conversations saved and searchable.
So I have a big spreadsheet where I paste all of my conversations before closing the communicator window.
That is a big pain. I'd like to automate it by capturing the onclose event of the communicator window, and doing some MS Office automation to write the contents into my excel file automatically. Going to get around to it one day...
Build after every checkin. I would love to never again worry about which checkin broke the build - wouldn't even need to keep the results of the build, just verify that it doesn't fail.
I dream about this feature:
IDE (or at least ReSharper :) ) will analyze units of code (methods, or just small code blocks) and automatically save frequently used pieces of code as snippets (along with their context). Later these snippets can be used for auto-completion. This feature requires some kind of code analysis, but I will be satisfied even with some simple version. For example you can take a look at MS Office apps - they just remember recently entered text blocks and provide them in auto-completion drop-down boxes.
Ideally tool should perform some kind of pattern matching for code. It's not trivial but I believe it's implementable to some degree.
Enforce assembly-level guidelines over the codebase, so that violating them by any developer (I'm thinking about Junior devs mainly) will break the build (at unit-test level). The guidelines are to be expressed in some simple and yet non intrusive way (NDepend does not fit here). Samples:
These rules could be expressed in the assembly (rules for the usage of this assembly) and be applied to any other assembly (basically, checking, whether the second lib is sticking to some high-level guidelines)
C#, VS2008, CC.NET, NUnit
PS: I simply do not have time to write this one with Mono.Cecil+Boo
Another feature I find useful is coding rules checking tool. Something like StyleCop. I want to have an easy tool to create code patterns/rules that can be applied to code base. Such functionality could save me a lot of time during code reviews. For example, I can define pattern (in pseudo code):
catch (.+) { <empty> } // Matches empty catch blocks
NDepend includes CQL (code query language). It would be really cool to have something like this in ReSharper (it will analyze actual code instead of MSIL)
I like drawing a lot of schemes, graphs and formulas on paper before getting into coding itself. It would be great to somehow have all that paper stuff scanned automaticaly and commited to svn server together with other documents.
A tool that would recognize & mark stale or unused variables/methods/files.
Setting up the development environment
This may seem as a one time thing to do, but actually it isn't. Somebody adds a new dependency, e.g. to a JMS queue: it need to be set up and configured. Somebody makes changes in the db: you probably have to update your db manually. There is a change in the Maven pom-files: the IDE project files need to be recreated which probably erases some of your settings.
If you have more than one computer you develop on, all of this needs to be done for each computer.
If I could press a button that made sure everything was up-to-date it would be wonderful.
Propagation of changes in database schema to stored procedures and functions.
I would love to know what fields my stored procedures reference and then be able to have then updated automatically or at least have a list of what to change.
During code reviews/refactoring sessions I often need to quickly find problematic pieces of code. I find following feature to be very useful:
Show colored file map (like File Structure window in ReSharper)
For example I can open map window, choose "cyclomatic complexity" and see color coded code map where color ranges from light green (methods with low CC) to dark red (methods with high CC)
If I set mouse pointer inside some method show various code metrics for this method in tool window
If metrics would be re-computed in background I can monitor in real-time how refactoring affects the code.
Spell-checking code and comments, according to some basic vocabulary (project-specific or company-specific).
We have this in FxCop, but this is not interactive.
I'd like to see more support for automated deployments. It'd be nice if the resulting build of any given project (web application, win application) produced an MSI package that was ready to take input parameters mapping to the project-level properties.
There are tools to do this, but nothing quite as automagic as my dream :)
Something to help generate simple struct/data classes. Such classes have read only properties and a single constructor to set the property values. Anonymous types are great but sometimes you need a named type.