Must Have SharePoint dev tools

Question

I have only been doing development work in SharePoint the last 6 months. Coming from a client server background the tooling situation in SharePoint was a rude surprise, but I think that I have by now picked up the majority of the Must Have tools.

Which tools should be in every SharePoint developers toolbox in your opinion ?

My list so far includes:

• Powershell (PowerGUI is my current editor)

• Brian Wilsons SharePoint Event
  Handler

• Event Handler tool by the late Patrick Tisseghem

• Keutmanns SharePoint Manager
  2007

• VSeWSSv12

• Our VMWare ESX server (fast, easy to make snapshorts)

• VMware Player (nice to be able to
  work even when offline)

• Firebug

• Reflector

• A home made Active Directory explorer in order to verify against the AD

• Seems like I invented the wheel again, sigh. Now I use an AD browser from MS

  Edited:

• the U2U CAML Query Builder is awsome, thanks for the tip

  -Being a consultant more than a developer I have to stress how important PowerShell is in my daily work: learn it, live it. Love it!

Answer 1

I am sure that you also use Visual Studio, but beside from this I have a couple of additional tools that I would include in my toolbox:

• WSPBuilder (for building SharePoint solutions - couldn't live without it)

• SharePoint Designer

• DebugView

• IE Developer Toolbar

Answer 2

My best tools are:

SPCamlViewer

CAML Query Builder

Sharepoint Variation Editor

Answer 3

STSDEV in my view is good tool for creating solutions, like WSPBuilder and better than VSeWSSv12.

Answer 4

If you are doing anything with Search, then I can recommend our SearchCoder toolset: SearchCoder

Answer 5

Another great tool for SP developers:

SharePoint Manager 2007

It is a SharePoint object model explorer which exposes pretty much everything.

Answer 6

WSPBuilder for automated builds.

WSS SDK for quick offline WSS documentation, samples, white papers, etc.

MOSS SDK for quick offline MOSS documentation, samples, white papers, etc.

SharePoint Solution Installer for easy deployment of WSP packages

Imtech Fields Explorer for auto generating content type-based Page Layouts and features.

SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool for checking for potentially undisposed webs/sites.

Get SharePoint to Validate to make those ugly HTML-table based web part zones into XHTML.

YACAMLQT for us who can't be bother with how to nest CAML into valid statements.

SPSReport for generating reports of the farm when an error is hard to track down.

SmartPart for hosting web user controls inside web parts without a line of code.

Typemock Isolator for writing Unit Tests in SharePoint

Fiddler for tracking what's going on between client and server

IIS Diagnostics Toolkit for easily enabling SSL (and other stuff)

Answer 7

Should check out the list of tools on the SharePointDevWiki.com page 'Other Development Tools'.

Answer 8

SPVisualDev from CodePlex is another excellent tool to try out.

Answer 9

In addition to being a great persisted object browser, MAPILab Spy for Microsoft SharePoint is a fantastic tool learning the SharePoint object model and how types interrelate. Many of the one-off command line applications that are needed to read, set, or observe object instances can be avoided with this tool.

MAPILab Spy does run $69, so something like SharePoint Manager 2007 (mentioned above in both Kasper's question and Tudor Olariu's reply) gets you some of the same functionality for much less (that is, for free!) For me, though, it's been worth the money for the tool in the development work I've done ... and no, I'm not a spokesperson (paid or otherwise) -- just a satisfied user :-)

Answer 10

I've found that SP-Lint+ has helped me a number of times when I've mis-typed a value in a configuration file. See link text

Answer 11

SPTraceView hooked up with DebugView is an excellent combo for production debugging.

Since most of the interesting stuff is going on in the database behind the scenes, Sql Profiler is a must if you want to know what stored procedure is being called etc.

Answer 12

I'm using sharegate to replicate my Dev/QA/Prod environment

http://www.share-gate.com/

Answer 13

Notepad++ For handling encoded XML, linearizing XML, etc. Very handy when SharePoint designer gets on the way.

Answer 14

LinqPad