Education Ecosystem Blog

Every engineer worth his/her salt should have a set of awesome ASP.Net productivity tools to help increase productivity. Livecoding.tv engineers are no exception. We would like to share one such set of tools, plugins, and libraries that ASP.Net streamers use on Livecoding.tv on a daily basis.

What is ASP.Net?

ASP.NET is a free web framework for building great Web sites and Web applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You can also create Web APIs, mobile sites, use real-time technologies like Web Sockets and more! ASP.net is used all over the world, recently Microsoft has released it’s new debugging feature in its Visual Studio Code using ASP.net language.

ASP.Net Productivity Tools, Plugins & Libraries

So here are the ten (10) best ASP.Net Productivity Tools, Plugins, and Libraries recommended by Livecoding.tv engineers:

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a rich, integrated development environment for creating stunning applications for Windows, Android, and iOS, as well as modern web applications and cloud services.

Fiddler

Fiddler is a free web debugging proxy for any browser, system or platform. Fiddler debugs traffic from PC, Mac or Linux systems and mobile devices. Ensure the proper cookies, headers and cache directives are transferred between the client and server. Supports any framework, including .NET, Java, Ruby, etc.

LINQpad

LINQPad is not just for LINQ queries, but any C#/F#/VB expression, statement block or program. Put an end to those hundreds of Visual Studio Console projects cluttering your source folder and join the revolution of LINQPad scripters and incremental developers.

Reference your own assemblies and NuGet packages. Prototype your ideas in LINQPad and then paste working code into Visual Studio. Or call your scripts directly from the command line.

.NET Reflector

With .NET Reflector you can decompile, understand, and fix any .NET code, even if you don’t have the source. Third-party platforms aren’t always well-documented. Use .NET Reflector to look inside their assemblies, and see how they work and which APIs you can call.

dotPeek

dotPeek can decompile any .NET assemblies into equivalent C# code and optionally show the underlying IL code. dotPeek can work with a variety of formats, such as libraries (.dll), executables (.exe), and metadata files (.winmd).

dotPeek can also decompile .baml files, enabling you to reconstruct XAML UI definitions. As dotPeek is based on ReSharper’s powerful code insight architecture, it lets you navigate decompiled assemblies in a contextual or context-insensitive ways, get a quick summary what’s inside each decompiled file, set bookmarks and explore inheritance chains.

BrowserStack

According to TechRepublic, BrowserStack simplifies web application testing. BrowserStack provides a way to test web applications on different browsers and operating systems via an easy-to-use web interface.

AutoMapper

A convention-based object-object mapper. 100% organic and gluten-free. Takes out all of the fuss of mapping one object to another.

AutoMapper is a simple little library built to solve a deceptively complex problem – getting rid of code that mapped one object to another.

ASPhere

ASPhere is a freeware utility primarily intended for creating and modifying configuration files for ASP.NET. But they are not only web.config files ASPhere can work with, you can use it for viewing and editing normal XML files and plain text files as well.

PostSharp

PostSharp is the #1 pattern-aware extension to C# and VB. It allows developers to eradicate boilerplate by offloading repeating work from humans to machines. PostSharp contains ready-made implementations of the most common patterns and gives you the tools to build automation for your own patterns.

.Net Memory Profiler

.NET Memory Profiler is a powerful tool for finding memory leaks and optimizing the memory usage in programs written in C#, VB.NET or any other .NET Language. With the help of the profiling guides, the automatic memory analyzer, and specialized trackers, you can make sure that your program has no memory or resource leaks, and that the memory usage is as optimal as possible.

In Conclusion

This list is by no means exhaustive. This is just the ten (10) best ASP.Net tools used by Livecoding.tv engineers. No doubt you may have your own top ten list. What are they? And why do you think they are the best ASP.Net productivity tools and plugins? For additional reading on ASP.Net productivity tools and a more comprehensive list, check out CODEPROJECT’s website.