The 2nd ALT.NET tool night

On Monday I attended the 2nd ALT.NET tool night (IL) – and it was a blast! There were 20-30 of us .NET developers who decided to take the time and learn about new tools. 

AN so I came, I saw, I ate pizza and in between I got to talk with some really talented folk.

The following tools were demoed:

Test Lint

TestLint is a new addition to Typemock’s unit testing tools. It parses your code and finds common unit testing problem such as tests without any assertions, logic inside your unit tests and so on.

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Cost:

TestLint has a free Visual Studio (currently 2010) add-in. a commercial command line version (that you can run on your build server) currently costs $199.

CodeRush

I’m a Resharper person myself but nevertheless I was amazed on how much productivity features CodeRush has. In the right hands you can make this tool “go to 11”. The audience enjoyed the colored markers, arrows and jumping code that were displayed with every single refactoring done.

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Cost:

About $249 – it does have a free version and 60 day trial you can try.

nDepend

I’ve done a short overview of nDepend. I’ve used NUnit as the target project and used nDepend to analyze it. I’ve shown the many matrices it has and how CQL can be used to create new rules. For more details have a look at the review I wrote.

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Cost:

Pricing details are available on nDepend site. I suggest you download a fully functional evaluation and see what it says about your project – you might be surprised.

Process Explorer

If you don’t know about Sysinternals and Process Explorer – shame on you. I can’t start counting the times this tool has helped me. Ariel has done a good job of showing all the ins and outs of process explorer and even managed to explain most of the data it shows.

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Cost:

Free

IronRuby

Although IronRuby is not a tool Shay made a good case on how it can help us static language developers in everyday tasks:

Cost:

Absolutely nothing

Testify

Testify A tool for the 1st time you have to start a new project. All you have to do project type and choose a name and press Generate.

Testify creates the tree structure, along with a few well known open source tools:

You get an installer, build script, and 30 unit tests (what??).

But that’s not all! just in case you’re the type that gets his kicks from running stuff from command line - you get a bunch of batch files to do these repetitive tasks such as opening NUnit GUI.

But seriously – this tool address a need: When starting a new project and you’re not sure what to put where or how to create the initial build script or installer, give it a try and if you don’t like what you get – customize it!

Cost:

Free – open source

So far so good

It was a good meet-up and I hope not the last.

If you’re a .NET developer that wants to learn more about tools and practices – join us at ALT.NET either from the Facebook page or sign up at for emails notification and discussions at the Google group (or both).



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