How do you start knowing when to write code?

Question

I've been a programmer for a few years now and I've noticed that my productivity increases and error rate decreases the less code I write. I favor collections over writing my own data structures and I've utilized libraries from various sources where I can (python packages, codeplex, etc). I'd like to take it a step further though and learn how to auto generate code for AJAX applications, database interactions, text file processing and MVC patterns. What tools do web or .NET programmers use to be more productive and develop applications faster?

Answer 1

If you are using Visual Studio: Resharper. This will do a lot for you as far as equality contracts and auto generating common code. It also makes it easier to refactor and provides some good code cleanup recommendations.

Answer 2

An integrated development environment (IDE), frameworks (like .NET or Django), libraries (like NumPy). You probably already use all of those things, though.

Recommendations for IDEs:

• Visual Studio (only and best choice for .NET)
• Eclipse with PyDev (for Python programming--probably not a good choice if you do most of your work with IronPython though)

Basically, anything that adds abstraction. IDEs are useful because they don't require you to know exact names of functions and classes or command-line intricacies of compilers. Frameworks are useful because they provide pre-packaged goodies for you to build with in certain situations. Libraries are good because they implement useful things. All of these things save time by doing things for you.