For developers that just cannot get Visual Studio Premium, but still want to use some code analysis tool, I would recommend to take a look into new version of FXCop 10 from Microsoft.

Now it’s a part of official  Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4. You can download it for your version of OS (x86, x64 etc) from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=35AEDA01-421D-4BA5-B44B-543DC8C33A20&displaylang=en

After you install SDK, just go to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\FXCop folder and run setup for FXCop from here.

Ah, and be sure – new version support both .NET 2.0 / 3.5 and latest 4.0!

Hope this helps somebody

Download them here.

New in the November 2009 SDK (quote from Microsoft Windows Azure team newsletter):

• Windows Azure Service Runtime managed library: The latest version of the Service Hosting Runtime API includes support for enhanced communication between roles and for runtime notification of service configuration changes. Direct communication between role instances enables new application development scenarios, including applications that distribute state across role instances. Service configuration changes include an increase or decrease in the number of request role instances and changes to the values of configuration settings.
• Windows Azure Diagnostics managed library: The new Diagnostics API enables logging using standard .NET APIs. The Diagnostics API provides built-in support for collecting standard logs and diagnostic information, including the Windows Azure logs, IIS 7.0 logs, Failed Request logs, crash dumps, Windows Event logs, performance counters, and custom logs.
• Certificate Management: Enhanced support for SSL certificates in Windows Azure and in the Windows Azure SDK enables the secure automated deployment of certificates to services hosted on Windows Azure.
• Variable-size Virtual Machines : Developers may now specify the size of the virtual machine to which they wish to deploy a role instance, based on the role’s resource requirements. The size of the VM determines the number of CPU cores, the memory capacity, and the local file system size allocated to a running instance.
• External endpoints for worker roles. A worker role may now define any number of external endpoints for HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP, and specify the desired port number for any external endpoint.
• Persistent local resource storage: Developers can now choose to persist data written to a local storage resource at runtime when the role is recycled.
• Windows Azure Storage Client managed library: The Storage Client library provides a .NET API for accessing the Windows Azure storage services.
• Improved Development Storage: Development storage provides a high-fidelity simulation of the Windows Azure storage services in the cloud. Tables can now be created dynamically in the development storage Table service and are no longer required to be generated in advance.
• Updated samples: The samples included with the Windows Azure SDK have been updated to demonstrate new features. The samples now include both C# and Visual Basic versions.

As we can see – a lot of improvements and new features introduced in this release. I will made review of them right after will have time to check (hopefully today later)! In any case, glad that MS improve Azure SDK so quickly!

Update: after installation and first review, I found following:

• It seems like Microsoft finally have “official” Client library for Azure Storage. The name is same like from samples before, i.e. “StorageClient”, but now it is in “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient” namespace, not like “Microsoft.Samples.ServiceHosting.StorageClient” that was before! It is also VERY extended and improved, so if you going to use Azure Storage, for sure you need to use this library (and I am also going to use it in my EvejobAzNET project) – it give you access to Blob Service, Queue Service and Table Service! Sure like before, it is possible to use simple .NET Client Library for ADO.NET Data Services (and new library use it inside anyway, just check that it reference System.Data.Services.Client library inside)… But with official Azure Storage Client library a lot of tasks become much more simple! You can found this library (*.dll) in “c:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\ref\” folder, together with other useful binaries!
• It is possible now to use another “official” library to get programmatic access to most of functionality available before only from Azure Developer Portal (and actually I don’t know why, but for some reasons Portal works and looks not best way! You can google, A LOT of people complain about issues with this!).
• A new Library for Logging and Diagnostic functionality was added to SDK (Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics namespace) - feel free to review samples in SDK (zip archives available in root folder of SDK installation, i.e. in C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0 by default – samples-cs.zip for C# version and samples-vb.zip for VB version)
• A lot of other improvements / features was added that relate mostly to development / production environment (Visual Studio Azure support, new release of Development Fabric etc) – they not change significantly your code / application design, instead of features described above that I highly recommend to review in case if you develop for Azure!

OK So i decide to publish here MyFaTo (don’t forget to register this cool name for next killer start up! ha ha). If seriously, list contain not only Tools, but also frameworks, plug-ins, extensions etc that I use daily (i.e. every working and not working day .

Will try to keep this list up to date

Here is it (some of them I grab from my old micro blog at Tumblr):

* Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/ultimate)

* JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA 9 (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea)

* JetBrains ReSharper 5 (http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper) – best productivity add-in for Visual Studio. Don’t use it and code in .NET? You miss whole world!!!

* Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools extension to VS 2010 (http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/d0d33361-18e2-46c0-8ff2-4adea1e34fef) – amazing features, including vertical tabs for opened files in VS)

* PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010 (http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/e5f41ad9-4edc-4912-bca3-91147db95b99) – a lot of nice to have and useful features in VS 2010

* VsCommands for VS 2010 (http://mokosh.co.uk/vscommands) – same like above and more

* SlickEdit Gadgets for Microsoft Visual Studio (http://www.slickedit.com/content/view/441) – amazing and free gadgets… mostly i like “line ruler and indentation guide” – just take a look and you will never drop this feature (but first be sure that you enable it!). What’s important is this gadget works well with VS 2005 / 2008 and don’t cause any problems with a lot of other gadgets / plugins! Try it! Cool and Free!

* EntLib (http://www.codeplex.com/entlib) – “Must Use” blocks for Enterprise Software Developers

Cover most of Aspects, like Caching, Logging, Security, IoC, etc… Now I use new version 5.0.

* Moq (http://code.google.com/p/moq/) – best available mocking library for .NET 3.5 / 4 (at least today…….. i pretty sure that still exists in testing / mocking / TDD a LOT of space for creative ideas and implementations!)

* Because spend above too much time (just so like Moq) about testing, here will just put references to NUnit (http://www.nunit.org/) and xUnit(http://www.codeplex.com/xunit). Looks like best what we have now (and what is free ) for unit testing in .NET……. Sure we want more automation, sure we want….

* TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.net/)  & TortoiseGit (http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit)- best available tool to forget about “command-line” style of SVN / Git (at least in daily usage) – integrates to explorer and give you all options available in SVN / Git and even more…

* AnkhSVN plug-in for Visual Studio (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/) – working with SVN repositories directly from Visual Studio… Previous versions have problems with performance, but looks like latest versions 2.x have no problems at all!

* Firebug (http://getfirebug.com/) – “You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.”. Any yes, i like it more then IE development toolbar…. not really sure why Maybe because it’s more user friendly (or developer friendly)

* Quartz.NET (http://quartznet.sourceforge.net) Quartz.NET is a full-featured, open source job scheduling system that can be used from smallest apps to large scale enterprise systems.

* Spring .NET (http://www.springframework.net) Spring.NET framework provides comprehensive infrastructural support for developing enterprise .NET applications
A lot of useful modules (you can use them independently from each other) for AOP, Data Access (NHibernate, ADO.NET etc), Web (DIP for Pages etc…),  Testing, Messaging, Threading and even Quartz integration and many more…

If you do a lot of debugging, I suggest to take a look to following tools:

* Crack.NET (http://cracknetproject.codeplex.com/) - A runtime debugging and scripting tool that gives you access to the internals of a WPF or Windows Forms application

* Mole for VS (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/macros/MoleForVisualStudioEdit.aspx) - Visualizer with property editing. Mole is a high performance, full featured, multifunction visualizer that allows detailed inspection of WPF, WCF, WF, ASP.NET, XBAP’s and WinForm applications.

* CPU-Z is a freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of your system. It is really fast and free way to get info about your hardware! It is also make sense to check another utilities on same site – most are free and useful!

* WiX (Windows Installer XML Toolset) is a Toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages.

* InstallShield 2010 (http://www.flexerasoftware.com/products/installshield.htm) – my favorite tool to create powerful installers. Exists free, but restricted version. Integrates WELL inside VS 2010!

* Paint .NET – free image and photo editing software (it’s not replacement for Photoshop, but good replacement for build-in Windows paint application with a lot of advanced features)

Post Updated 13/06/2010