Configuration Items List 2

Thursday, November 6, 2008

.NET Tools

I've made changes to the list of software I regularly use. Here is the updated version;

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite SP1
Microsoft Enterprise Library 4.1 and Untiy 1.2 (logging, database access, exception handling, inversion of control and dependency injection and validation)
JetBrains TeamCity 4.0.2 (continuous integration server)
Oracle Data Access Components 11.1.0.6.21 for Oracle 11g (Oracle database provider)
GhostDoc 2.1.3 (tool for documenting .NET source code)
SDC Tasks Library 2.1.3155.0 (build tasks)

See my previous list at: http://weblogs.asp.net/ricardoperes/archive/2008/08/13/configuration-items-list.aspx

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is a nice refresh, I particularly like the CSS editing capabilities and I think it is more stable and fast than previous versions. I also like the ability to debug Microsoft source code, it was about time!

In Enterprise Library 4.1 I use Unity a lot. I don't know how it compares to Spring.NET for IoC and dependency injection, but I like what I have. However, I don't like the fact that I must add by hand (or by using an extension) the Policy Injection configuration, I think it should do it out of the box, and I also don't like the lifetime manager mechanism... I will post about these in the near future.

Regarding TeamCity, I think it is much better than CruiseControl.NET, mostly because I don't have to edit by hand the XML configuration files, but I think it is also more powerful, and has direct integration with NUnit and FxCop, as well as with MSBuild.

I just noticed that ODAC comes with session state providers, profile providers and membership providers, which can replace Microsoft's versions, which only work with SQL Server. Nice!

SDC Tasks is simply great! It comes with much more tasks that MSBuildTasks, for example. It has virtually everything I need for my builds, for example: