Dom Cosgrove Blog

SharePoint Inspector is a free tool to browse your SharePoint 2007 farm.

You can see objects composing its structure, get their properties by reflection, which can be very useful when you want to check if your code does what it should do.
You can use also some advanced features like activate/deactivate SharePoint features, add/remove event receivers, manage your recycle bin. Thanks to Gaetan Bouveret great utility.

The purpose of this project is to extend the raw WSS xsd to include annotated documentation taken from the SharePoint SDK so that developers don’t have to break their train of thought while they go searching for information about each element. Thanks to John Holliday for providing this.

The tool will help you build, test and execute your CAML Queries. This version of the tool only let you build CAML queries for execution against lists. Thanks to those Belgium guys at U2U.

This is something that should be in any .Net developer tool box. .NET Reflector enables you to easily view, navigate, and search through, the class hierarchies of .NET assemblies, even if you don’t have the code for them. With it, you can decompile and analyze .NET assemblies in C#, Visual Basic, and IL.

BDC Meta Man

BDC Meta Man is the first Business Data Catalog tool for all SharePoint Developers and Administrators interested in line of business data integration with SharePoint. Without writing a single line of code you can be viewing and searching across your business data through Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in minutes.

This is a great tool provided by the guys from Lightening Tools. The free to download version gives you some limited functionality.

Nick Swan and Brett Lonsdale the cofounders of Lightening tools have also produced a great book on the BDC “SharePoint 2007 Developer’s Guide to Business Data Catalog”. They can also be heard on the Excellent SharePoint Pod Show with co-host Rob Foster. Definitely check it out.

A SharePoint Solution Package (WSP) creation tool for WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007
- No more manually creating the manifest.xml file.
- No more manually specifying the DDF file.
- No more using the makecab.exe application.

Carsten Keutmann you’re a legend… what more can I say!

The SharePoint Manager 2007 is a SharePoint object model explorer. It enables you to browse every site on the local farm and view every property. It also enables you to change the properties (at your own risk). This is a very powerful tool for developers that like to know what the SharePoint holds of secrets. Another great tool from Carsten Keutmann.

Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data.

SPSource is a tool for SharePoint developers to assist in the creation of WSS Solution Packages (WSPs) allowing for the use SharePoint Designer and the SharePoint web UI to make quick changes to items, then push those items into Visual Studio for later compilation into a WSP. Thanks to Jeremy Thake.

SPTraceView analyses in real time the ULS trace messages coming from all MOSS components and can notify you using a balloon-style tray bar messages when something of interest happens.

SPDisposeCheck is a tool to help you to check your assemblies that use the SharePoint API so that you can build better code. It provides assistance in correctly disposing of certain SharePoint objects to help you follow published best practice.

This project is a Windows application for an eased and more user friendly installation and deployment of SharePoint 2007 solution files to a SharePoint server farm. Distribute your SharePoint solution files with this installation program instead of a raw script using STSADM.EXE to install and deploy the solution.

The SharePoint Search Service Tool is a rich web service client that allows a developer to explore the scopes and managed properties of a given SharePoint Search SSP, build queries in either Keyword or SQL Syntax, submit those queries and examine the raw web service results. This tool can be useful in troubleshooting and verifying the behaviour and configuration of a SharePoint environment.

CodeRush for Visual Studio® .NET will help you create sophisticated code blocks in seconds and extend code templates instantly. CodeRush will complete identifiers as you type and expand or contract selections logically. With CodeRush, you will be able to instantly place selected code inside Try/Catch blocks, Regions and your own custom wrappers with ease.

ReSharper provides solution-wide error highlighting on the fly, instant solutions for found errors, over 30 advanced code refactorings, superior unit testing tools, handy navigation and search features, single-click code formatting and cleanup, automatic code generation and templates, and a lot more productivity features for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, XML, and XAML.

The Visual Round Trip Analyzer tool helps web developers and testers visualize the download of their page, identify best practices and changes that improve web performance. The network Round-Trip between the client and server(s) is the single biggest impact to web page performance – much greater than server response time.