Log in to like this post! Top 10 Free Developer Tools: Part 1 DevToolsGuy / Monday, January 18, 2016 The heart of a coder resides in the code he writes. A philosophical we know, but stay with us. A core developer will on average spend 6 hours a day in ‘development mode’. Their time can be spent writing and rewriting documentation, ensuring what they’ve worked on is bug free, optimized to its fullest and without memory leaks. To do all this in the most efficient and productive way, a typical dev will rely on a personal treasure chest of tools that make their lives that little bit easier. Remembering C/C++? Who reading this can remember C/C++? Intuitive it was not. Running a simple program took considerable effort. The guidance of a notebook, coupled with large amounts of coffee was often the best ways to get you through. Fast forward to today and developer tools are so user friendly that it makes the life of dev very far less painful - hooray! Today we want to champion those tools and take a look at 5 of the 10 best developer tools currently out there. We’ve based our Top 10 on the following: User friendly code editor and Graphical User Interface Powerful Intellisense support for the language Advanced Debugging Open Source Extensive community support First up, Visual Studio. 1. Visual Studio Community 2015 For all the Microsoft app developers, Visual Studio is a lifeline for developing .Net and other Microsoft technologies code. For years Visual Studio wasn't available to individual users or to open source developers. As Microsoft have changed strategy, 2015 presents a new outlook. They are now very much ‘open’ to the outside world and as a result have launched ‘Visual Studio Community 2015’ which will be free and available to the open source community. As Microsoft say themselves, it’s “‘a free, fully-featured, and extensible IDE for creating modern applications for Windows, Android, and iOS, as well as web applications and cloud services.” It should be noted that it’s only available to individual users and non-enterprise open source developers. There are extensive plugins available for such third party add-ons such as Python, PHP, Bootstrap, Node.js, etc. So no matter what language you choose, Visual Studio can be seen as one stop shop for all kinds of application development and a tool many can’t live without. You can start using the Visual Studio Community 2015 by downloading it from here. 2. Visual Studio Code With .NET being open source, Microsoft also made Visual Studio a free developer tool and named it ‘Visual Studio Code’, which can be used on Windows, Mac and Linux. This code focused and code-optimized lightweight tool, is not a complete IDE. There's no File, New Project or visual designers. Great for those that work purely in the command line. We’ve picked out a couple of key features for Visual Studio Code which make it a go-to for many devs: Over 30 languages covered (and still counting) Syntax Highlighting Code Focussed Editing Code Understanding GIT Version control Customizable theme ASP.net 5 and Node.js supported VS Online supported for the cloud collaboration You can download the Visual Studio code from here. 3. SPCAF Code analysis is an integral part for any developer. These days organization focus a lot on code analysis and mandate policies that need to pass through their specific code analysis test. Ensuring code is not vulnerable to any security threats is highly important. Incorrect code can lead unstable environments, performance problems and improper management. SharePoint Code Analysis Framework - popularly known as SPCAF - is used to run the code analysis on the SharePoint applications to check for the memory leaks or any related security threats. It checks your HTML, ASPX, XML and CSS against the quality policies, standard practices, correctness and security and provides a detailed report for it. With SPCAF you can create a set of rules to define what standard practices must be followed and what should not be allowed. You can download the SharePoint code analysis framework from here. 4. WebMatrix WebMatrix is one of the most powerful and lightweight web development tools available to create and maintain your website, whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud. It includes IIS Express (a development web server), ASP.NET and SQL Server Compact. Some of the key features which ease the development and maintenance of the website are as follows: Available for all the top languages like JQuery, Bootstrap, HTML5, ASP.Net or PHP It’s open source Using Cloud Integration you can easily publish your website directly to the cloud from the web matrix. Source control support with GITHUB and Team Foundation Server. Mobile Support for the website is available. For quick changes you can quickly edit your remote site from the WebMatrix itself. With Powerful Community Support there are plenty of extensions available to support third party libraries like Node.js, Bootstrap, etc. You can start customizing your website by installing the WebMatrix 3 from here. 5. Notepad++ Notepad++ is the free source code editor that supports a number languages. Extremely lightweight, it’s available on Microsoft’s windows environment. A great tool to examine source code files or if you need to write a quick HTML, JavaScript or PHP code file. Do so directly on the server without having to load heavy IDE tools. Some key features of Notepad++ are: Multi document tab interface Syntax Highlighting Regular expression based search and replace functionality Auto completion of word, function along with the parameters hint Multi language support External Plugin support Whether you develop your application using Notepad++ or not it’s a must have tool for many developers. You can download Notepad++ from here. Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll bring you tools #6 - 10!