Our .NET toolbox

Over the course of our careers, we’ve used many different tools to be as effective as possible at our jobs. As we’ve moved through technologies, from language to language and from platform to platform, many tools have fallen by the wayside—which isn’t a bad thing. It’s the natural evolution of our careers and the technologies that exist within them.

Equally important is that the tooling we use within one technology and platform continually evolves. We watch for pain points in our development process and we also watch the ongoing creation of tools that are available for our current platform. It’s this constant change of tooling that allows us to get as close as possible to optimal development performance.

With that constant change in mind, we’ve compiled a list of some of the current tools we can’t do without on projects. Some, like CruiseControl.NET and TeamCity, are duplicate solutions to the same problems. In those cases we don’t differentiate. Instead, read it like this: we’ll work with either, but never neither.

As we’ve tried to emphasize, this list is constantly changing. Make no mistake: keeping up with the steady stream of new technologies, tools, and practices is a daunting task. But the time invested in becoming skilled with these tools is valuable. There’s no way that you’ll be able to take this list; spend a weekend with it, the internet, and your development environment; and expect to be able to work proficiently with these tools. Be willing to invest the time, and the returns will pay dividends.

Productivity tools

Automated testing tools

Continuous integration and automated builds

Metric generation

Data access

Inversion of control and dependency injection

Aspect-oriented programming

User interface

Logging

Source control

Code profiling and diagnosis

Challenge your assumptions: Someone else might be doing it better

One of the key ideas we discussed time and again in this book is that you should constantly challenge your assumptions when working in this industry. When looking for ideas and guidance, remember that this is an industry. It’s not just the .NET developer community.

Don’t be afraid to look past your community (no matter if it’s .NET, Java, Ruby, or even COBOL) for good ideas. Many ideas in this book trace their roots to the Smalltalk community. Others point back to Java. Look into these communities, and others, and be open and willing to learn from them.

Also, don’t isolate yourself in an object-oriented world when looking for ideas. Look beyond to procedural (yes, we said what you think we said) and functional programming paradigms. We can guarantee you one thing: our industry, and especially the .NET platform, are too young for any of us to know how to do everything right all the time.

Be humble, far reaching, and adventurous when you challenge your assumptions.

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