Many of the student developers are familiar with Visual Studio IDE as their primary dev tool, but there are actually a whole lot more add-ons and third party tools available out there. These tools can really help to make your dev task more efficient and effective. Some of them can even help you produce better quality codes. End of the day, developers are a “good-lazy” bunch. We want to finish up our task list and move on to better and more interesting stuff.

There are many places to download such tools. One good place is the Visual Studio PowerToys Weblog. But today, I want to introduce a very useful free Microsoft dev tool that frequently used in many organisations and frequently mentioned in development mailing lists – FxCop (home page).

Basically FxCop (team blog) is an application that examines your managed code (.NET) assemblies and returns information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localisation, performance, and security improvements based their conformance to the .NET Framework Design Guidelines. This way, you can educate yourself with best practices guidelines and enhance your reputation as a top-notch developer in your team. FxCop is now available for download,  targeting both .NET 1.1 (VS 2003) and .NET 2.0 (VS 2005) environments.

Happy coding and optimising your development experience.