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visual-studio-2010resharperndependdottrace

The VS 2010 Ultimate vs 3rd party utilities

From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/273858/software-worth-buying, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/143088/open-source-c-projects-that-have-high-code-quality and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/180939/net-must-have-development-tools, I found some software tools are multiple recommended such as Reshaper, dotTrace, and NDepend.

I use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, and it has some features such as code coverage, profiling, and StyleCop to name a few, and it's pretty expensive.

As a user of VS 2010 Ultimate, is it worth while to invest those tools I mentioned? Or, do they provide similar functionalities that VS 2010 Ultimate already has?

Solution

  • Prosseek, this is a good question you are asking. I have tested VS options and most of third-party options. From my experience, third-parties tooling are always more convenient whatever the area covered. I agree with Ladislav Mrnka opinions: VS Ultimate provides large feature set out of the box but many features are like "basic implementation". In more details:

    • R# is more subtle and relevant than VS equivalent, when it comes to read, edit and refactor code.
    • NCover is as fast as VS coverage, but it doesn't come with the frictionfull instrumentation phase. Also NCover proposes more interesting facilities to harness coverage results.
    • DotTrace is faster and easier to harness than VS profiler, both for performance and memory management. There are also interesting alternatives like RedGate ANTS performance and memory profilers.
    • TestDriven.NET is more adapted to run tests than VS test integration, especially because it integrates with most of third-party options (as a consequence if you are only using VS tooling, TD.NET is useless).

    My opinion is certainly biased concerning NDepend since I am part of the tool team. An objective and measurable fact is that NDepend is 10 to 100 times faster concerning dependency graph and matrix and I encourage you to verify this fact by yourself (NDepend comes with a trial). Also, here you'll find an independent comparison of NDepend versus VS2010 Arch.