Appendix A. Useful Resources and Tools for Visual Basic 2012

The Visual Basic 2012 language is an even more powerful version than its predecessors and enables you to access every feature and technology exposed by .NET Framework 4.5. But the Framework is a large technology, and the language has so many features that remembering everything is almost impossible. So, instead of remembering everything, it is important for you to know where to search for information, resources, and learning material. Moreover, Visual Studio 2012 is a powerful development environment that includes a plethora of tools to make your development experience great. There are some situations in which the IDE does not include particular features that are instead provided by third-party tools. This appendix gives you a number of Visual Basic resources inside the MSDN documentation and websites for you to bookmark in your Favorites. Also, this appendix provides a list of useful tools for you as a Visual Basic developer. They are all free tools, so you can enjoy their functionalities.

Visual Basic Resources in MSDN

Following are learning resources for Visual Basic 2012 inside the MSDN Library and websites:

The Visual Studio Developer Center–Visual Basic: The principal website from Microsoft dedicated to Visual Basic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh388568.

Visual Basic “How Do I” videos: A portal where you can find a lot of videos illustrating programming techniques and usage of Microsoft technologies with Visual Basic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/bb466226.aspx.

Visual Basic Code Samples: A sub-list of code samples from the MSDN Code Gallery specifically targeting the Visual Basic language: http://bit.ly/ObAnY6.

Asynchronous Programming Developer Center: A specific portal from MSDN where you can find resources about the new asynchronous programming patterns and related language syntax. This is available at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx

CodePlex, the famous website hosting open source projects (www.codeplex.com) where you can find complete applications written with Visual Basic, including source code.

Learn Visual Basic, a portal where you can find a list of tutorials covering a great number of Microsoft technologies with VB: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/hh388573.

Visual Basic MSDN Library, probably the most important reference for every Visual Basic developer, where you can find documentation, language reference, walkthroughs and examples: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/dd831853.aspx.

.NET Framework Developer Center, the principal website for information on all .NET-based Microsoft technologies: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/default.aspx.

Also don’t forget to use search engines, which in most cases will be your best friends. Typically they will return the most accurate results if your search is performed by writing English strings.

Useful Developer Tools for Visual Basic

This section provides a list of free useful tools that will enrich your developer toolbox.

Coding Tools

In this section you can find a list of tools to improve your productivity in writing better code.

CodeRush Xpress from DevExpress is a free Visual Studio add-in that enhances the Visual Studio code editor by providing refactoring tools to write better, more-readable, and more-efficient code. If you used Refactor! Express in the past, CodeRush is its more powerful successor. You can find it at http://www.devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/CodeRushX/.

Code Snippet Editor is an open source tool written in Visual Basic for creating and exporting reusable code snippets with advanced functionalities in VB, C#, and XML languages via a comfortable graphical user interface. It is available at http://snippeteditor.codeplex.com.

Vsi Builder 2012 is a free extension from the author of this book that enables creating .Vsi packages for deploying code snippets, add-ins, and additional contents for Visual Studio. You can download it from http://VsiBuilder.codeplex.com.

P/Invoke Interop Assistant is an open source tool that lets you write P/Invokes in a better way: http://clrinterop.codeplex.com/.

Networking

One of the most famous tools in networking is Fiddler, which is a free Web debugging proxy that can log all http and https traffic between the computer and the Internet. Other than inspecting http traffic, Fiddler can set breakpoints and walk through incoming or outgoing data. You can find it at http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/. Fiddler is particularly useful in debugging WCF services and WCF Data Services, other than requests coming from Web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Data Access

For data access tools, you can find LINQPad very useful. This is a free tool that provides advanced instrumentation for querying data sources and that can generate the necessary code using LINQ. Visual Basic is one of the supported languages. You can find it at http://www.linqpad.net. At the moment in which this appendix is being written, LINQPad supports .NET Framework 4.0 and so can be used with no problems against the new release of Visual Basic.

Diagnostics and Performance

This section lists a number of tools for Visual Studio diagnostics and applications performance.

SciTech Memory Profiler is a powerful application which allows investigating the memory usage and allocation of a .NET application. It is particularly useful to search for memory leaks and bad object lifetime management. This is not free, but it is very powerful. You can check it out at: http://memprofiler.com/.

Windows Performance Toolkit is capable of analyzing performances of WPF applications through different kinds of analysis methods. This tool is available with the installation of Visual Studio 2012, shipping as part of the Windows SDK tools.

Miscellaneous

In this section you can find a list of tools not strictly related to a single technology or that cannot be classified in other sections.

Visual Studio Power Tools is a must-have extension that adds a number of useful coding and management tools to the IDE. It is free and is available from Microsoft on the Visual Studio Gallery.

JustDecompile is a free tool from Telerik, capable of exploring .NET assemblies via Reflection. The tool can show the Intermediate Language or offer decompilation results in both Visual Basic and Visual C# of the specified executable. JustDecompile is not only useful for reflecting or decompiling assemblies, but is also particularly useful for inspecting .NET Framework Base Class Libraries and understanding how many things are implemented behind the scenes. You can find it at http://www.telerik.com/justdecompile.aspx.

Windows Azure Management Tool is an open source snap-in for Windows Management Console that provides client-side access to Windows Azure’s blob storage and queues, where you can easily upload your contents. It is available at http://wapmmc.codeplex.com/.

Where Do I Find Additional Tools?

If you are interested in enhancing your toolbox with third-party tools, check out the Visual Studio Gallery (http://visualstudiogallery.com) that contains hundreds of useful tools divided into categories. Also visit both the MSDN Code Gallery (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com) and the CodePlex community (http://www.codeplex.com) where you can find hundreds of useful tools, which are free in most cases.