Tools

Last week I attended one of Microoft's "Windows Camp" developer days looking at Windows 8. The morning was a series of informative talks, followed by a hands on lab building a Windows 8 Metro app.

One of the highlights of the day was the opportunity to use the beta of Visual Studio 11, and the experience of working in such a visually different environment.

It doesn't suck.

After a very long time indeed, we finally have a new version of FxCop to play with.

While the Source Code Analysis tool integrated into Visual Studio has been upgraded, the standalone version of FxCop has gone a long time without any updates at all.

So I've finally managed to get fxCop officially adopted on a work project (*). Better yet, thanks to an upgrade, we now are using the Ultimate Edition of Visual Studio: I no longer have to use the command line of fxCop . Instead, It's integrated right into the build.

Of course, no improvement goes unpunished.

At this weeks .NET user group, a friend mentioned Gource, a tool that generates a dynamic visualization that shows how a project evolves over time, based on the commits made to source control.

After finding one movie on the Xero blog, I decided to have a go and see what it looked like when run over a large project I've worked on for the last couple of years.

It looks gorgeous:
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Roy Osherove has posted a list of things he installs on any new developer machine, including links so you can find out more.