Lots of Cool Tools to Checkout for ASP.NET 2.0, .NET 2.0, and VS 2005

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

A lot of new .NET 2.0 enabled developer frameworks/tools are coming out this week. A few of the ones I'd recommend setting aside sometime to checkout:

NCover: NCover is a free code-coverage analysis tool for measuring what percentage of your code has been exercised during exection (for example: from your unit tests), and enables you to pinpoint testing holes and coverage gaps in your apps.

TestDriven.Net: TestDriven.Net provides a free unit testing framework that integrates into all versions of Visual Studio. Support for NCover code analysis (see above) was recently added to it. You can learn more about it in this blog.

CSLA .NET 2.0: Rocky Lhotka released a public beta of his popular CSLA Business Objects framework (he is also publishing two books next month about it). Included within the free framework download is a new ClsaDataSource control that provides a custom datasource control for ASP.NET 2.0 that makes data-binding to Business Objects built with CSLA pretty sweet.

West Wind ASP.NET 2.0 Compiler Utility: Rick Strahl has built a really sweet (and free) tool for more easily managing production compilation and deployment of ASP.NET 2.0 applications.

CodeSmith: CodeSmith provides a great templating framework (it even uses familiar ASP.NET syntax) for doing code-generation of pretty much anything. It includes support for generating DALs against a database schema. One nice thing about all of the code it generates is that the code is generated from templates that you can customize -- so you control exactly what standards and coding conventions are used. You can download a 30-day free trial copy here.

WilsonOrMapper: Paul Wilson recently updated his popular O/R data mapper to version 4.2.1 (and added support for the new SQL 2005 ROW_NUMBER() function for efficient paging that I also discussed earlier this month in these two blog posts). You can download it here. You can also learn about how to use it with the new ASP.NET 2.0 ObjectDataSource control here. Update: Mike also just posted a great walkthrough using the ObjectDataSource here.

LLBGenPro: Frans Bouma's popular O/R data mapper supports .NET 2.0, and Joseph Chancellor recently published a new book showing how to use it with VS 2005 and SQL 2005. You can learn more about the book (and download some free chapters from it) here. Visit the LLBGen site to download LLBGen and give it a try.

Hope this helps,

Scott

4 Comments

Well Scott, you have just broken a record.

You have blogged more in January than you have in any prior month; and have more than once per day!

David Taylor - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 11:32:00 AM

Hi Scott, your blog has been an invaluable resource for me at work. Thanks for all the useful blogs. I hope they will always be available for searching in your site.

Elrey Velicaria - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 6:35:00 PM

I'm not sure if this is a politically correct question but since I've seen these code coverge an unit test tools mentioned a bunch of times, should I assume that these are a step up from what gets included with VS2005?

Peter Kellner - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 8:35:00 PM

dOOdads :)

And there is ObjectDataSource for dOOdads ;)

Mateusz Kierepka - Wednesday, February 8, 2006 6:20:00 PM

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