Ran across this post from Chris Fulstow on 10 free tools for Visual Studio. And then of course there’s the 10 Must-Have Visual Studio Addins on MSDN. And Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Tool List (does the guy ever sleep?).

Since it’s tool overload, I’m going to try out three:

WinMerge

WinMerge is a free diff/merge tool. Sure, Beyond Compare is awesome, but it’s not free. And I like free. See how WinMerge points out exactly what’s different in the lines, rather that just saying “hey these two lines are different somehow.” I think that’s awesome.

GhostDoc

Ok, I figured out what GhostDoc does. It doesn’t generate a help file for you (like I thought when I first read the name) … it just auto writes the triple-slash XML Documentation comments for you, based on reflection and naming inspection. I usually write summaries for all my methods, but I leave the overridden methods undocumented and let the documentation tool copy the comments from the underlying type. But it’s cool that GhostDoc will do that, too. I also don’t usually write comments for my method parameters since they’re often obvious enough from their name or from the method name (e.g. AddTwoNumbers(int firstNumber, int secondNumber) — what’s your guess on what the params are for?). But I like that GhostDoc will give those documentation anyhow. It feels more “complete” I guess. And definitely makes the generated help files look more professional. The below example is all auto-generated comments.

/// <summary>
/// Appends the HTML text.
/// </summary>
/// <param name=”htmlProvider”>The HTML provider.</param>
public void AppendHtmlText( IHtmlProvider htmlProvider )

FxCop

We’ll see how this one turns out. FxCop inspects your compiled assemblies and lets you know if it has sucky design, naming, performance, security, or localization. I certainly don’t expect it to be gospel, but it’s probably nice to help point out stuff you’ve missed.