Top .NET Development Tools That Every Developer Should Know

ReSharper is a Visual Studio Extension that comes from JetBrains. This tool helps a number of quick-fixes, to perform on-the-fly code analysis and comes with automated code refactoring. It comes with more than 450 context actions and 60+ refactoring.

For the developers who want to complete the .NET development project quickly, this is the right tool. As the tool comes with multiple code editing helpers, it can be considered as a good tool even for the beginners. The helpers can be used for rearrangement of code, instant code transformations, auto-importing namespaces and display of documentation.

Now this does not come as a surprise when you will find Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code in the list of essential developer tools. This Microsoft product comes with its own benefits which we cannot neglect in any way. This tool comes with an advanced environment to build .NET applications and so is one of the most popular tools available in the market for developers.

A wide range of solutions like web services, websites, mobile apps and web apps are developed using Microsoft Visual Studio. You can write and debug code with ease using its amazing tools. These tools also help the developers to collaborate in the best possible manner.

This tool is free to use, open source and lightweight. IntelliSense is a feature that comes with Visual Studio which offers smart completions based on variable types, function definitions and modules that are imported. Moreover, for customization it comes with many extensions and in-built Git commands.

With this tool the developers can write and test the codes at the same time. By using such an automated concurrent testing, it is possible for the developers to have quality metrics set while writing the code. Here the developers can keep on improving the quality of the code as this tool offers critical information on the tested code. The inline exception details and the intelligent test execution which comes with NCrunch, makes it a preferred option. No doubt this tool is a paid one but the kind of the features that it comes with makes it worth your money.

The efficacy of LINQPad is known to everybody and anybody can vouch for it in terms of .NET application development. By using this tool it is possible to query databases in SQL or LINQ and test any code snippet within a program instantly. Some of the reasons why it is preferred are optional auto-completion, integrated debugging and rich output formatting. Using this tool, the developers who use different .NET languages like Visual Basic, F# or C# can easily script and automate. This tool is free and lightweight in nature, without any expiry.

Developers are different and they follow unique way to write codes. As no two developers follow the same coding style, it is not that easy to decide on a single coding style. This is at such a point that StyleCop comes to the rescue for static source code analysis. If you are using Visual Studio 2017 then the best way to make use of StyleCop is by making use of analyzer which is Roslyn-based. The guidelines to write codes can greatly differ especially in case of .NET application development. You can create a standard guideline using StyleCop.Analyzers, which can include things like member naming to having whitespace rules. In order to help the developers make use of best practices, it offers a number of code formatting recommendations.