Valuable Tools you need in your Tool box

An article by Wouter van Eck No Comments

I found some tools which you just need to take a look at.

XAML Power Toys 4.0

The first one is XAML Power Toys 4.0, this is a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Add-Id that empowers WPF & Silverlight developers while working in the XAML editor. XAML Power Toys generates .NET 3.5 SP1 WPF compliant XAML and Silverlight 2.0 compliant XAML.

Although this is what the web site says, if you go through some of the videos, which I highly recommend you watch to get really excited, you find that the tool does so much more. It also generates M-V-VM code based on some pretty sophisticated wizards.

There is so much to say about this tool but I think it is better for you to take a look at the site @ http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/xaml-power-toys/

Don’t forget to watch the videos!!!

Mole 4.2 for Visual Studio

The next one is a tool, well actually more than a tool…, from the same people. This tool helps you traverse through objects during debugging scenarios. Again, you just need to take a look at the videos, it is pretty cool what you can do and the depth of information you can get from it. The Mole works with WPF, WCF, WF, WinForms and ASP.NET.

Mole is a Visual Studio visualizer. Visualizers have been part of Visual Studio since version 2005. During debugging sessions, visualizers allow developers to view objects and data using a customized interface. Visual Studio ships with several simple but useful visualizers.

Mole was designed to not only allow the developer to view objects or data, but to also allow the developer to drill into properties of those objects and then edit them. Mole allows unlimited drilling into objects and sub-objects. When Mole finds an IEnumerable object, the data can be viewed in a DataGridView or in the properties grid. Mole easily handles collections that contain multiple types of data. Mole also allows the developer to view non-public fields of all these same objects. You can learn a lot about the .NET framework by drilling around your application’s data.

Depending on the type of object you are visualizing you can view properties, fields, IEnumerable collection data, an image of the data/control, and run-time XAML.

Take a look at the site and view the videos @ http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/mole-for-visual-studio/