Top 5 .NET Developer Tools You Likely Never Heard Of

Everybody loves lists of tools. Scott Hanselman’s annual list of Windows tools has been immensely popular over the years and has opened my eyes to a bunch of new tools. The topic of tools has also been the subject of some very popular books, such as Windows Developer Power Tools and Java Power Tools.

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.
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  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.
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  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.

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