.Net: State of the Art in tools & frameworks

Question

This is question for those who work in .Net and are curious enough to expand their toolset, including also things beyond Microsoft's solutions.

Coming from the Java world, there is a toolset I would consider using every new project, such as:

• Spring for IoC and MVC.
• JPA/Hibernate for persistence and ORM.
• JUnit/TestNG for unit testing.
• Maven for build management.
• Sonar for code quality metrics.
• CruiseControl/Hudson for continuous integration.
• Etc.

Question:

What would be the similar toolset for high quality .Net projects?

My (basic) knowledge tells me that I should look into NHibernate and NUnit. Also, that I could still use CruiseControl for CI as long as my build procedure and testing scripts are sound. Does it makes sense? Any other worth looking tools? (coming from MS or from the community)

Some people has told me about Microsoft latest tools for CI (Team System, etc.), but they didn’t have real on-hands experience. If you have such experience, please feel free to share it.

Answer 1

Our current stack at work is as follows:

• Castle Windsor for IoC
• NHibernate for persistence/ORM
• NUnit for unit testing (I'm also working on adopting a mocking framework like Moq or Rhino.Mocks)
• MSBuild for builds
• TestDriven.NET for unit testing within Visual Studio
• TeamCity for CI (although we've used CruiseControl.NET/NAnt in the past)