Windows Developer Power Tools

6.0 Introduction

Sure, you can use Notepad to write enterprise-level applications. You can also use your daughter’s pre-school scissors to cut your quarter-acre lawn. The question is, do you really want to? It’s not only frustrating to spend loads of time on trivial matters like typing and error-checking; it’s also a waste of your productivity and brain cells.

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and similar code-writing tools exist to help you concentrate on the logic and design of the software you’re writing and save you from typing out thousands more characters than you need to. These tools also help you by pointing out syntax errors as you make them, so you don’t have to wait until you fail a compile to learn that you wrote System.Console.WriteLn("Foo"); instead of System.Console.WriteLine("Foo");.

Other tools, like Snippet Compiler, let you quickly prototype ideas without having to spend time getting a full project fired up in your favorite editor, while still others offer help with those baffling but oh-so-useful regular expressions.

These tools and their ilk boost your productivity, increase the quality of your code, and, more importantly, lower your frustration levels so you can remain in a calm Karmic state while writing your code.

The Tools

For working in a Visual Studio environment without having to buy the commercial product

Visual Studio Express Editions

Brings a large number of features from the full-scale Visual Studio Team Systems (VSTS) to a freely downloadable IDE. ...