Friday, June 26, 2009

The Yahoo! Developer Network

The Yahoo! Developer Network offers Web Services and APIs to make it easy for developers to build applications and mashups.

http://developer.yahoo.com/

Flex

Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/?view=samples

Switch Tools

These two tools are rather simple, but can be extremely useful. The first is the ASP.NET Version Switcher, which can be used to switch the version of ASP.NET that a virtual directory is running under. The second tool is the Visual Studio Converter, which can be used to switch a project file from Visual Studio .NET 2002 to Visual Studio .NET 2003.

http://www.denisbauer.com/NETTools/ASPNETVersionSwitcher.aspx.

NAnt

NAnt is a .NET-based build tool that, unlike the current version of Visual Studio .NET, makes it easy to create a build process for your project. When you have a large number of developers working on a single project, you can't rely on the build from a single user's box. You also do not want to have to build the project manually on a regular basis. Instead, you create an automated build process that runs every night. NAnt allows you to build your solution, copy files, run NUnit tests, send e-mail, and much more. Unfortunately, NAnt is lacking a nice looking graphical interface, but it does have a console application and XML files that specify which tasks should be completed during the build process. Note that MSBuild, the new build platform that's part of Visual Studio 2005, provides for very robust build scenarios and is similarly driven by XML-based project files.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nant.

NDoc

Code documentation is almost always a dreaded task. I am not talking about the early design documents, or even the more detailed design documents; I am talking about documenting individual methods and properties on classes. The NDoc tool will automatically generate documentation for your code using reflection to examine the assembly and using the XML generated from your C# XML comments. XML comments are only available for C#, but there is a Visual Studio .NET Power Toy called VBCommenter which will do something similar for Visual Basic .NET. In addition, the next release of Visual Studio will support XML comments for more languages.

http://ndoc.sourceforge.net.

FxCop

The .NET Framework is very powerful, which means there is great potential to create excellent applications, but there is equal opportunity to create poor programs. FxCop is one of the tools that can be used to help create better applications by enabling you to examine an assembly and check it for compliance using a number of different rules. FxCop comes with a set number of rules created by Microsoft, but you can also create and include your own rules. For instance, if you decided that all classes should have a default constructor that takes no arguments, you could write a rule that checks for a constructor on each class of an assembly. This way, no matter who writes the code, you will have a certain level of consistency.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/fxcop.

NUnit

NUnit is an open source unit testing framework built for the .NET Framework. NUnit allows you to write tests in the language of your choice to test a specific function of your application. Unit tests are an excellent way to test the functionality of your code when you first write it, and also to provide a method for regression testing of your application. The NUnit application provides a framework for writing unit tests, as well as a graphical interface to run these tests and view the results.

http://www.nunit.org

CodeSmith

CodeSmith is a template-based code-generation tool that uses a syntax similar to ASP.NET to generate any type of code or text. Unlike many other code-generation tools, CodeSmith does not require you to subscribe to a particular application design or architecture. Using CodeSmith, you can generate anything from a simple, strongly typed collection to an entire application.
When you are building an application, you will often find yourself repeating certain tasks, whether it's writing data access code or building custom collections. CodeSmith is particularly useful at such times because you can write templates to automate those tasks and not only improve your productivity but also automate the tasks that are the most tedious to perform.
CodeSmith ships with a number of templates, including ones for all the .NET collection types as well as ones to generate stored procedures, but the real power of this tool comes from being able to create custom templates. To get you started, I'll provide a quick introduction to building a custom template.

http://www.ericjsmith.net/codesmith.

Script#

Script# brings productivity to Ajax and JavaScript development. Script# is a free tool that enables developers to author C# source code and subsequently compile it into regular script that works across all modern browsers, and in doing so, leverage the productivity and power of existing .NET tools as well as the Visual Studio IDE. Script# empowers you with a development methodology and approach that brings software engineering, long term maintainability and scalable development approaches for your Ajax applications, components and frameworks.

Script# is used extensively by developers within Microsoft building Ajax experiences in Windows Live, Office to name just a couple, as well as by a external developers and companies including Facebook. If you’re building Ajax-based RIA applications, you owe it to yourself to try Script# today and see if it can help improve your own Ajax development!


http://projects.nikhilk.net/ScriptSharp/

JSON

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language.

http://www.json.org/

jQuery

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.


http://jquery.com/

Firebug


Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.


Just the way you like it

Firebug is always just a keystroke away, but it never gets in your way. You can open Firebug in a separate window, or as a bar at the bottom of your browser. Firebug also gives you fine-grained control over which websites you want to enable it for.

YSlow

Yahoo! YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page's performance, summarizes the page's components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.