Windows Developer Power Tools

But Doesn’t Visual Studio Team System Handle All This?

In a word, no.

Many developers and managers might wonder what the benefit of any open source or freeware project is when Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) has such a broad feature set. That’s a very good question, particularly since it takes time and effort to get productive with any new tool, regardless of whether it’s open source or VSTS. That’s a cost/benefit tradeoff that should concern managers, team leaders, and developers.

However, VSTS doesn’t do everything, and some of the things it does, it doesn’t do particularly well. Furthermore, some developers like having the flexibility to perform particular tasks in a different manner than VSTS allows.

There are also many tools in this book that fill gaps in VSTS’s feature set. You can’t get dependency information on your assemblies in VSTS, but you can use NDepend to generate detailed reports on your system’s relationships. You can’t use pairwise testing in VSTS when you need to pass large amounts of data through complex methods, but you can use MbUnit to automatically generate data via factories and drastically cut the amount of data needed. You can’t use any part of VSTS to tell you which process has a lock on a specific file, but you can use Process Explorer or Unlocker to find out what’s preventing you from using a file.

Finally, not everyone uses VSTS. VSTS is a wonderful development environment, but it’s very expensive and resource-intensive. VSTS users also need some sort of support channel if they want answers to difficult problems they encounter. Making use of open source and freeware tools brings incredible power to hobbyist developers, small development shops on tight budgets, and developers who just want to do things differently. Moreover, even well-established larger development teams may find FOSS tools can bring considerable value to their software development cycle.