The VS 2010 Ultimate vs 3rd party utilities

Question

From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/273858/software-worth-buying, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/143088/open-source-c-projects-that-have-high-code-quality and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/180939/net-must-have-development-tools, I found some software tools are multiple recommended such as Reshaper, dotTrace, and NDepend.

I use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, and it has some features such as code coverage, profiling, and StyleCop to name a few, and it's pretty expensive.

As a user of VS 2010 Ultimate, is it worth while to invest those tools I mentioned? Or, do they provide similar functionalities that VS 2010 Ultimate already has?

Answer 1

Prosseek, this is a good question you are asking. I have tested VS options and most of third-party options. From my experience, third-parties tooling are always more convenient whatever the area covered. I agree with Ladislav Mrnka opinions: VS Ultimate provides large feature set out of the box but many features are like "basic implementation". In more details:

• R# is more subtle and relevant than VS equivalent, when it comes to read, edit and refactor code.
• NCover is as fast as VS coverage, but it doesn't come with the frictionfull instrumentation phase. Also NCover proposes more interesting facilities to harness coverage results.
• DotTrace is faster and easier to harness than VS profiler, both for performance and memory management. There are also interesting alternatives like RedGate ANTS performance and memory profilers.
• TestDriven.NET is more adapted to run tests than VS test integration, especially because it integrates with most of third-party options (as a consequence if you are only using VS tooling, TD.NET is useless).

My opinion is certainly biased concerning NDepend since I am part of the tool team. An objective and measurable fact is that NDepend is 10 to 100 times faster concerning dependency graph and matrix and I encourage you to verify this fact by yourself (NDepend comes with a trial). Also, here you'll find an independent comparison of NDepend versus VS2010 Arch.

Answer 2

All these tools have trial so you can try it yourselves and you will see. VS Ultimate provides large feature set out of the box but many features are like "basic implementation". It is always about what you expect from these features and what you like. I love Resharper but I worked with people who didn't like it.