Monday, February 20, 2012

Right tool for the job


I seriously doubt that anybody would disagree with me saying that Visual Studio 2010 is the best IDE to date on the planet. With the extension like Sitecore Rocks, TDS and Resharper, the Sitecore development simply cannot be more pleasant and productive.

I’ve just recently discovered a few more Visual Studio extensions that are extremely powerful, especially in Sitecore context.

1. VS Commands:
Though the list of commands is pretty extensive, here is my absolute favorite: “Attach to Local IIS”:

image

It is smart enough to understand if you have only one w3wp process running and attaches with one click. If you have multiple ones, it will show you this dialog:

SNAGHTML39556e8

And how awesome is it that this dialog nicely shows the app pool name which helps you find the right process to attach to. Sitecore geeks should appreciate it.

2. Productivity Power Tools featuring:
- better find feature
- Solution Navigator instead of Solution Explorer
- Tabs which you can pin:
image- better “Add Reference” dialog.
and much more.

3. SlowCheetah
Handles environment specific config transforms beautifully!

4. NuGet Package Manager
For all the NuGet goodness.

I still need to figure out how to merry TDS to SlowCheetah. Based on what I know about the two, MSBuild is all you need Smile

6 comments:

Mark Ursino said...

I really like the Attach to Local IIS idea. Right now I just have a right-click code, Attach option but I will try out the tool you linked to.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi said...

Thanks for mentioning SlowCheetah, here is the download link for everyone http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/69023d00-a4f9-4a34-a6cd-7e854ba318b5/.

Unknown said...

Hi Sayed,

Thanks for your comment!
Your VS extension is awesome. As I mentioned, I still need to figure out how to have the transforms working on BUILD/DEPLOY without the need of publishing from VS, but that should be a matter of a few MSBuild changes. If I only knew MSBuild :-)

-alex

Unknown said...

Great article, Alex. I totally agree - Resharper and TDS make my development life much easier with SiteCore. As far as VS being the best...well, I have to admit I really liked IntelliJ from JetBrains :)

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi said...

I have blogged a while back about how to integrate SlowCheetah with a build server at http://sedodream.com/2011/12/12/SlowCheetahXMLTransformsFromACIServer.aspx.

Vlad said...

I'd like to recommend next tools.
If you work with SVN, so that is for you:
1)AnkhSVN - Subversion Support
2) Mindscape Visual Studio File Explorer