This is my list of little tools and helpers that I install on all my devices. It was inspired by Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List and some tools may overlap. Nevertheless, there are plenty of differences and I'm sure that you will find one or more gems that simplify your developer life. If you know a tool that is missing and is a must-have, please leave a comment with a link to that tool.
Git diff does its best to figure out if it can show you the differences in a file. However, sometimes this does not work - even when the file you are interested in is a text file. We use the UCS 2 character set for DbUp and Git believes that those are binary files. The resulting output is therefore rather useless:
A common task for developers is to store application specific configuration. There are many ways you can take to get that functionality. If you use .Net / C# you can use the simple, built-in way to work with configuration files. Let’s look how this works.
We started the migration to NUnit 3.0 as soon as the final version was released. Unfortunately, some bugs on Visual Studio Team Services ended this endeavour rather suddenly. We concentrated on shipping our product and postponed the upgrade. Now, with all our projects migrated, it is time to look back on the breaking changes that took the most time to upgrade.
Certain questions about a project can only be found in the source repository. The commit messages contain details on how your code was developed that you probably nowhere else have documented. The same is true if you want to know how many commits where made in a branch.
If you ever debugged code that had a list, you wished you could see more than the namespace and class name for the elements in that list. Today we look at one of my favourite features of OzCode to solve exactly that problem.
A good testing strategy may reduce your bugs tremendously. However, some bugs may still slip through and can only be found on your production environment. Today we look at a great feature of OzCode to isolate problematic data to use it in regression tests.
Good test data is as realistic as possible but isn’t from production. Leaks can happen on test systems as well and they are often less protected as production systems. Whenever you need test data you can start creating it from scratch or write a tool. Both options take time and effort. However, there is a third option: test data generators. Today we look how you can create realistic test data without much effort.
The .gitignore file is a great help to ignore certain types of files (like *.exe or *.dll). A little entry in this file and you no longer need to remember only to check in the files you really need but not the other ones.
Hangfire.io is a nice tool to perform background processing in .Net. Those background jobs can go from simple method calls you don't want to block the user interface for up to recurring tasks for maintaining your application. It's licensed under the LGPL v3 and can be used in closed source software. Should you need more features or support, you can take the Pro version.