Any Coding Tools or Utilities I Should be Using?

[Arcticool]

Are there any tools besides Visual Studio that I should be using to
learn C#. What utilities do you folks use and think could be helpful to
somebody trying to grasp all this?
Thanks,

Jack

[Peter Duniho]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:12:56 -0700, Arcticool <ar*******@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Are there any tools besides Visual Studio that I should be using to
learn C#. What utilities do you folks use and think could be helpful to
somebody trying to grasp all this?

Just for learning C#? IMHO, Visual Studio is all you need.

That said, once you've got the language fundamentals down pat, you will
almost certainly find the ILDASM.EXE tool that comes with Visual Studio,
and "Reflector for .NET" (http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/) useful for
inspecting the code the compiler generates and decompiling existing code
(respectively). You can learn a lot by looking at what the compiler is
doing, as well as how other managed code has been implemented.

I know less about the code and memory profiling tools available, having
used neither except the built-in code profiler for Visual Studio. But for
advanced optimization issues, those can be useful too. I don't really
think of them as learning tools though.

Pete

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

On Aug 15, 1:12*am, Arcticool <[e-mail]:

Are there any tools besides Visual Studio that I should be using to
learn C#. What utilities do you folks use and think could be helpful to
somebody trying to grasp all this?

I'm not sure I'd put it under the "learning" part, but JetBrains
ReSharper is an absolute must-have VS add-on in my view. Things like
better code navigation and usage searching, better refactoring and an
integrated unit test runner are very important to me.

http://jetbrains.com/resharper

Jon

[Pavel Minaev]

On Aug 15, 10:08*am, "Jon Skeet [C# MVP]" <[e-mail]:

On Aug 15, 1:12*am, Arcticool <[e-mail]:

Are there any tools besides Visual Studio that I should be using to
learn C#. What utilities do you folks use and think could be helpful to
somebody trying to grasp all this?

I'm not sure I'd put it under the "learning" part, but JetBrains
ReSharper is an absolute must-have VS add-on in my view. Things like
better code navigation and usage searching, better refactoring and an
integrated unit test runner are very important to me.

To clarify: VS2008 SP1 has "Go to definition" and "Find references"
for symbols out of the box, and Professional versions and higher have
an integrated unit test runner (for the MS unit testing framework,
naturally). ReSharper offers somewhat more convenient searching and
navigation, and provides many more advanced refactorings, but for a
beginner, the stock ones in VS should be more than sufficient.

In addition, ReSharper is often subjectively perceived to be rather
slow, dragging down the entire IDE with it, so some people avoid it
for this sole reason (myself included). But given that many others
happily use it, it does seem to be subjective enough, so probably not
something worth worrying about before you actually try it for
yourself.