These tool discussions are also recurring themes on all of the major discussion forums. It seems that every so often one of these questions hits StackOverflow and everyone chimes in with their favorite current tools. Invariably, for the .NET tool lists, there are some tools that always show up and; enjoying near universal  advocacy in the .NET developer community. This includes tools like Reflector and Fiddler on the free side and Ants Profiler and Resharper on the commercial side.

For this blog post, I’ve decided to go with 5 tools you’re not likely to find on any/many of these lists. While some of these tools are .NET-specific, other tools are just solid development tools that are likely to be great additions to any .NET team’s toolbox with the added benefit that they work across multiple technologies.

1. Badboy. Likely the biggest sleeper on my list. Badboy is an extremely easy-to-learn web application testing tool. Check out the online documentation to understand features and then use it to guide your learning. Chances are that you’ll have most of the basic and intermediate level scripting tasks mastered within the first 30 minutes of using the tool. Compare the cost of a Badboy license ($45 / individual or $30 / each for a 10-pack) with the cost of your existing web application testing tool. Chances are you’d be saving hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per license. If you need to scale beyond simple Badboy threading / load testing capabilities, Badboy scripts can be exported in a format consumable by Apache JMeter for more heavy duty controller/generator type load testing. Also, the Wave Test Manager server, from the makers of Badboy, allows you to upload and share badboy scripts across a project, schedule execution of the scripts, and access the reports from the tests on a central server.



2. Lightspeed ORM. When the discussion of Object Relational Mappers (ORMs) comes up, NHibernate and the Entity Framework are almost always at the forefront of the conversation. LLBLGen gets added to the list as well if commercial ORM’s are on the table. Rarely, if ever, is the Lightspeed ORM from the Mindscape team down under ever brought up. It should be. If an awesome Visual Studio modeling experience and second generation LINQ provider don’t convince you, maybe the Rails’esque data migration facilities will. Still not convinced? Check out the custom LinqPad provider and LINQ-to-SQL to Lightspeed drag and drop conversion. If there are new features you’d like to see or if you need bug fixes, Ivan and the team at Mindscape are all ears and provide a near legendary turn around time.



3. Silverlight Spy. Let’s recap just in case you missed the news – Silverlight is hot!!! It’s a pretty significant change from either the MVC or WebForms approach most .NET web developers are used to and takes a while to wrap your mind around. Silverlight Spy does for Silverlight what Reflector did for the .NET Framework, pulls back the covers so that you can inspect and understand. Silverlight Spy provides insight into the XAP package, isolated storage information, performance data, an accessibility view and so much more. The message from Microsoft over the last 6 months has been – learn Silverlight. That task is made so much easier with Silverlight Spy at your side.



4. DTM Data Generator. Microsoft recently finally got around to including a data generator in some versions of Visual Studio. If you restrict yourself to SQL Server and are willing to deal with slow data generation, it might even be a good fit for you. RedGate’s SQL Data Generator, which I’ve written about before is much more efficient at loading data, as long as you stick with SQL Server. If you’re looking for data generation tool to meet your needs, irrespective of the underlying database you use, DTM’s Data Generator is the tool for you. DTM’s data generator supports SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, Sybase, and any database you can access through OLE DB or a DSN. It supports inserts of most major datatypes, including BLOB generation and supports a variety of rules comparable to RedGate’s product, including the use of custom rules. The enterprise version can be executed from the command line in silent mode, making it perfect for generation of data in preparation for the execution of an automated test suite.



5. Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL). This tool just doesn’t get enough love from the .NET development community. Oft maligned as the “poor man’s SCOM”, PAL can be a real timesaver and/or lifesaver. It’s so simple: capture the PAL specified counters for the platform being monitored (most major MS products such as Windows Server, IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, and AD are supported), import the counters and let PAL do its thing. It’s “thing” is producing a detailed report for the counters showing how they looked across the duration of the capture and when the counters exceeded thresholds. PAL also provides explanations for each of the counters and details the implications are of exceeding the thresholds.  More useful information for a better price you will not find.

]]> http://www.beckshome.com/index.php/2010/04/top-5-net-developer-tools-you-likely-never-heard-of/feed/ 10 http://www.beckshome.com/index.php/2010/04/fiddler-demo-camtasia-for-mac/ http://www.beckshome.com/index.php/2010/04/fiddler-demo-camtasia-for-mac/#comments Sat, 17 Apr 2010 12:13:34 +0000 Thomas Beck http://www.beckshome.com/?p=929 I was up at Penn State IST school this past week giving a lecture to a class as part of our recruiting. As part of the class, which was about application integration, I touched on the HTTP protocol. I believe that it’s extremely important that everyone starting out in web application programming or web-based integration have a deep knowledge of the HTTP protocol. Although you should eventually read a book about HTTP and ultimately read the protocol itself, sometimes it’s easier to learn by tinkering. Along these lines, I thought it would be interesting to provide a quick demo of using Fiddler to inspect the HTTP protocol. I’ve included the screencast here. My apologies for the speed of the screencast. I was in a hurry to get it done and it sounds like I had an energy drink of five too many when I did the voice-over.

I used Camtasia for Mac to record the screencast. Camtasia for Mac is a relatively new entrant to the marketplace and is priced at $99 to compete directly with Screenflow, the long time incumbent in the Mac screencast market. The tool couldn’t be easier to use. It took no time at all to capture the screencast and post-capture editing, an area where Camtasia has always shined, is both powerful yet incredibly intuitive. If you’re in the market for a Mac screencasting tool, I can only recommend Camtasia. You can pick up a free 30 day trial and, after that, $99 introductory pricing will get you the full product.

I was hoping that the upcoming release of Outlook 2010 would provide some features that would really wow me. I’ve been working with the beta version of Outlook 2010 on several of my machines and, although there are some nice features such as threaded email conversations and some basic social networking integration, I have yet to say “Wow”. Since Outlook 2010 wasn’t fulfilling all of my needs, I decided to look into Outlook plug-ins to see if third party software vendors were able to fill the gap.

I was surprised to find that there is a relatively small offering of Microsoft Outlook plug-ins. I found three that I decided to assess. I’ve provided a brief summary of these tools below as well as my initial impressions.

• MissingLink – MissingLink was the first plug-in I looked at. It unifies emails, calendar entries, contracts, files, and tasks into a project view, which was one of the features I was initially looking for. I spent a day or two using the plug-in, only to realize that it was a quirky plug-in supported by a single developer. MissingLink simply wasn’t going to work for me and quickly fell to the wayside.
• ClearContext – ClearContext was the second plug-in I looked at. It had all the project-based features of MissingLink developed in much more professional format that integrated very well with both Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010. MissingLink offers an abundance of features. As I evaluated these features, I found that ClearContext simply wasn’t for me. I don’t want to change my system for managing emails and ClearContext has a set way of doing things. Still, I’d recommend ClearContext to anyone looking for a new system to help manage their emails. The product looks to have a passionate user base who have benefited from using the product.
• Xobni – Xobni (yeah, that’s ‘inbox’ spelled backwards) was the final plug-in I looked at. It offers none of the project management features I thought I originally wanted. Two weeks later, I’m hooked on Xobni and my colleagues at work are asking “what’s that cool thing in your Outlook sidebar?”

Xobni is available as a free plug-in from xobni.com. Once you get hooked on the free plug-in, you can opt for Xobni Plus, which will set you back about $30. The plug-in offers a bunch of very cool features. I’ve provided some color commentary and screenshots of the things that have impressed me over the last several weeks. Try Xobni out. I think you’ll find yourself saying “Wow” too.

• Search. Xobni indexes all of your emails and provides screaming fast full text search. Once you use Xobni’s search, you will never go back to Outlook’s built-in search.
• Automatic Address Book. Even if you limit your Outlook contact list to a sane number of contacts, Xobni will go make an “automatic address book” that includes everyone you’ve ever communicated with. It automatically extracts phone numbers from the emails and adds them to the address book for you and, if you’re using Xobni Plus, Xobni will use your Automatic Address Book for email address autosuggest so you’ll never have to look up an email again.
• Social Network Interaction. Xobni crushes Outlook 2010 and Google’s Buzz, feeble attempts at integrating social media into email. Xobni seamlessly integrates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Salesforce, providing you pictures of the people in your address book along with Facebook and Twitter status updates. I have shocked to find how many pictures of people automatically made their way into my Xobni address book.
• Threaded Conversations with Zoom. You just have to see this one to believe it. Xobni creates threaded conversations for all of your interactions with a particular person. If you hover over the thread, you can see the entire conversation, along with the pictures of the people in the conversation (as available).
• Time Scheduling Feature. I just love this one and wonder why Microsoft didn’t think of this 10 years ago. Xobni generates an email with your availability for the next week and sends it to the person in question. Very convenient way to schedule meetings, especially across organizations that don’t share Exchange servers.
• Email Analytics. This is less on the really useful side and more on the “cool and interesting” side. Xobni’s analytics range from person-by-person rankings of your most important contacts to detailed statistics and graphs that are generated outside of the plug-in in a separate analytics module. Xobni  also offers up “fun facts” about who responds to you the fastest, who you respond to the fastest, etc. so that you can follow up to these contacts with emails (with links to the Xobni product, of course).

As Scott mentions in his blog, a prerequisite to getting the IIS SEO Toolkit up and running is the installation of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. I was surprised how easy this installation went. When the installation is complete, you’ll have a new icon on your desktop and a new “Management” section within the IIS admin tool. The Installer looks like a great tool although I’m sure that some (myself included) will be leery about Microsoft installing server-related software on their machines.

I followed ScottGu’s recommendations for installing and running the tool. After running it both against Scott’s site and then performing some follow-up analysis, there were several things that I felt warranted a bit further explanation:

1. The scan of my blog took a lot longer to run. This was on the order of 8 minutes for my blog versus the 13 seconds Scott quotes. My suspicion is that, especially as your site’s link depth increases and you point towards more external media, the scan takes longer to run and pseudo-index it all. In short, the IIS SEO Toolkit is doing a full spidering of your web site and the time to do so will vary according to the size and complexity of your site.
2. Scott mentioned but didn’t go into a lot of detail on the robots exclusion and sitemap / site indexing tools. I was hoping that there would have been a bit more automation that would occur after the initial site analysis was run but was disappointed to find out that this was not the case. These tools look to be little more than editors slapped on top of these files.
3. On the positive side, there’s a lot more that this tool can do than was covered in ScottGu’s brief post. In short, the analysis provides four information groupings: violations, content, performance, and links. Of these, ScottGu only covers one, Violations. I offer some more information on the other capabilities and features below.

Site Analysis Trending Capabilities

The IIS SEO Toolkit stores historical analysis metadata and details. This effectively affords you the capability to perform analysis and trending of your site’s SEO and other critical metrics over time. You can see below how my site changed between two different analysis runs.

Content Summary

The content summary offers an abundance of information on content types, hosts, link, files, titles, and keywords. This information is useful for SEO and other site maintenance activities. The image below illustrates one example of the content summary – the pages with broken links summary.

Performance Summary

The performance summary section provides information on slow pages, pages with a large amount of resources, and page performance metrics by content and directory type. These statistics require a bit of interpretation. The image below is of performance by content type. This report allows further investigation as to why some content types categorically take longer to render than others do.

Query Capabilities

All of the canned reports in the IIS SEO Toolkit are backed by a query engine. The ability to directly query the data is also provided using a simple query builder. As of this release, it looks as if queries are restricted to a single analysis run. It would be nice in the future if the queries could be expanded to span multiple analysis runs and provide a longitudinal picture of a site’s evolution.

• Getting Wordpress Up and Running on IIS is Very Easy – I was surprised how easy it was to get Wordpress running on IIS 7. The entire process took me no longer than 30 minutes to complete once I had the correct guidance in place. The items that were of the utmost help to me here were as follows:
• Webpage – Using FastCGI to Host PHP Applications on IIS 7.0 – A great introductory background and overview document on FastCGI on IIS 7. A good first read but shouldn’t be used as an installation guide.
• Screencast – Installing PHP on Windows Server 2008 – First in a three part series that will get you up and running with WordPress on IIS7.
• Screencast – Installing MySQL on Windows Server 2008 – Second in a three part series of screencasts covering the installation and initial database creation under MySQL.
• Screencast – Installing Wordpress on IIS 7 – The third and final screencast should bring you home with the installation. If you install the newest version of PHP / WP, several of the IIS settings covered at the end of this screen cast will have already been made for you. Just ignore them.

• There’s Help Porting Content Into Wordpress From Other Blog Engines – This was very welcome news as porting everything by hand would have been intolerably tedious. Porting blog content is a two step process:
  • Das Blog to BlogML Converter – Converts DasBlog source XML into standard BlogML file that can be imported into WordPress.
  • WordPress Import Module – The import module covered at the bottom of this post allows you to import BlogML into WordPress.

• Don’t Forget About Mapping the URLs of Your Entries so That All Your Links Don’t Break – Maintaining external consistency is critical to followers of your blog. They care little that you migrated onto new software. Google cares even less. Don’t make people think about this. Do the work for them and map your legacy URLs to the new URLs in WordPress so that the change is transparent to everyone but you. Most of the guidance I could find on the web around mapping WordPress URLs dealt with Apache mod_rewrite. Fortunately IIS 7 provides an extension called “URL Rewrite” that can rewrite incoming URL requests. This article and the links within provide you everything that you need to understand URL Rewrite and get the job done.

• Take The Opportunity To Leverage the Cloud – Although the text ports fairly well using BlogML as a bridge, the other binary content (images, document, etc.) need to be moved over manually. You can just copy the DasBlog contents folder over to maintain URL continuity or you can get a bit more ambitious. I chose to leverage Amazon’s S3 file storage service to store all of my binary content so that I don’t have to worry about backing it up or moving it ever again. I took the opportunity to set up S3 virtual hosting so that, with a bit of DNS trickery, my blog binary contents are all served from http://s3.beckshome.com.

• Identify and Engage the Necessary Wordpress Widgets – One of the key features of the Wordpress blogging engine is its extensibility and the vast array of freely available themes and plugins that you can use to add valuable functionality to your blog. A top 10 or 20 list of plugins would warrant another post entirely and there are a multitude of these lists already out there. Instead, I’ll recommend a series of plugins that I found to be absolutely necessary to replace content or functions I had available under DasBlog and which I considered “table stakes” for the move over to Wordpress.
• Flickr Badge Widget – I replaced separate DasBlog pages for my photos and videos with a single Flickr Flash Badge that links to my Flickr account.
• Kimli Flash Embed – I have a screencast I did on Microsoft Virtual Earth a while back. This was the only way to embed it into the main Wordpress page.
• SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – I have a bunch of source code snippets embedded in my blog entries, mostly C# and Ruby. This plugin made them look better than they ever did on my older blog with zero fuss.
• WP Google Analytics – Despite the avialbility of Wordpress stats, I’m sticking with Google analytics. This plugin made the transition seamless.