What Are Your Favourite ASP.NET Add Ons / Tools To Improve Productivity & Code

Question

I'm wondering what other tools / frameworks / Add Ons people use to improve their productivity / development speed when coding in ASP.NET.

I just use VS2008 on its own but wanted to find out what other people use with VS2008 AND WHY??

Answer 1

I use:

GhostDoc: GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML documentation comments for C#. Either by using existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or by deducing comments from name and type of e.g. methods, properties or parameters.

CodeRush Xpress for Visual Studio: CodeRush Xpress is freely available to all Visual Studio 2008 developers and offers a comprehensive suite of tools that enable you and your team to simplify and shape complex code - making it easier to read and less costly to maintain.

CoolCommands: It contains lots of cool stuff, but I mainly use the font-functionalities like: 'Demo Font' or 'Wheel Font Sizing'. E.g. Demo Font easily switches the font to a size which is perfect for giving demos on a beamer. If you disable it again, your font size is switched back to its original size.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if this counts, but we use CruiseControl.NET for our buildserver, which in the long run, helps productivity as well.

I have used Resharper for a while, and although it does improve productivity, I eventually uninstalled it since it made my Visual Studio too slow. Although I have to admint, that was almost two years ago, so it may have improved since then.

Answer 3

Mine tools are: CodeRush and Refactor, as well as VisualSVN.

Answer 4

I love link StyleCop

Answer 5

Microsoft Expression Web: can open a Visual Studio .Sln file, but is focused on design. And it is included in my MSDN subscription.

Answer 6

In addition to ReSharper, IE Developer ToolBar and FireBug improves your speed if you're working on javascript and css on your project. Also Fiddler is good tool for debugging puposes.

Answer 7

Google Chrome: Has a very nice "Inspect Element" item on the context menu. Amongst other things, the screen will learn you very easy where the CSS properties are coming from.

Answer 8

I'm a big fan of ReSharper, Web Developer Toolkit and Firebug in Firefox, Chrome, GhostDoc and Fiddler (particularly useful for JSON requests). Oh and YSlow.