Windows Developer Power Tools

4.0 Introduction

Code reuse is a critical part of good software development. Why spend time and money designing, building, and testing a library if someone’s already done the heavy lifting for you? The story told way too often in software development circles is of the team that decided to “implement their own X,” where X could be a logging framework, a custom Flash graphing engine, a compression formula, and so on. The team always ends up spending way more time working on their custom creation than actually adding value to the business they are working with, and usually the project gets cancelled or goes way over budget. Don’t make the same mistake; always use an existing library whenever possible!

The Tools

For abstracting business rules into XML

NxBRE

Gives you the ability to pull your business rules out of your code and keep them stored in XML or Visio documents.

For adding quality logging to your application

log4net

Lets you create logfiles for your application with varying levels of detail. The people responsible for maintaining your application will thank you.

For implementing search functionality

Lucene.Net

Gives your users enhanced search functionality.

For comparing libraries

LibCheck

Compares two versions of an assembly to see what has changed. This can be very useful when you’re trying to diagnose why something is broken or is causing unexpected behavior.

For visually comparing assemblies

Reflector.Diff

Lets you visually compare the differences between assemblies.

For adding spellchecking capabilities to your application

NetSpell

Gives your users the ability to check their spelling while using your application.

For adding chart capabilities

NPlot

Lets you add charts and graphs to your application.

For sorting collections

NSort

Gives you the functionality to sort your collections in a number of different ways.

For adding RSS to your application

RSS.NET

Enables you to add RSS feeds to your site (and read from current RSS feeds) without writing a line of XML.

For adding compression to your application

SharpZipLib

Easily compresses files or information using any number of compression algorithms.

For writing XML documents

ExcelXMLWriter

Lets you easily export Excel spreadsheets from your application.

For creating PDFs

iTextSharp

Gives your users the ability to export PDFs from your application.