Making your .NET development job easier

What tools assist with your .NET development? TechRepublic posted a great article recently about .NET development tools that are available to make your jobs easier. Here's there sample list of development tools, but check out the comments to the article for additional suggestions from the field. Anything you would add?

Snippet Compiler: Developers often need to run a bit of code to see the results, and building and compiling a project is overkill in this situation. The Snippet Compiler allows you to compile small code snippets quickly and easily with support for .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0.

The Regulator: Regular expressions are a powerful tool that may be used with JavaScript and Web development or in your .NET code. One problem with them is the actual building of an expression as the syntax is a bit arcane. The Regulator tool allows you to build and verify regular expressions via an easy-to-use interface.

NUnit: Testing is a critical aspect of every development project. The NUnit tool facilitates the creation of unit tests to test projects as they are developed.

NAnt: The popular NAnt tool allows you to easily create build processes for your projects. It is a great tool when working with multiple developers, but the latest version of the .NET Framework includes the powerful MSBuild tool, which provides much of the same functionality without the need of an additional install and setup.

CruiseControl.NET: This provides an automated integration server so that code changes are automatically incorporated into project builds. It smoothly integrates with NAnt and Visual Studio and provides monitoring tools to keep tabs on projects and builds.

Altova XML Suite: Simple text editors are fine for working with the occasional XML file, but larger XML-based work is simplified with XML-specific tools like the XML Suite from Altova.

NDepend: Examine the efficiency of an application's code with code metrics generated by the NDepend tool.

CodeSmith: Reclaim development time by generating common code with the CodeSmith tool.

-Posted by Christy H.