My top 10 tools for a better SharePoint development experience

Hi,
The purpose of this blog post is to present some tools that I’m using in my day to day SharePoint activities. I will not talk about the very rich Microsoft tools such as SharePoint Designer, InfoPath et…I’d rather focus on tools that really help hardcore developers to be more efficient in both development and troubleshooting.
This list of tools can probably be largely extended, so don’t hesitate to add comments to present your favorite tools.

CKS Dev

Available at http://cksdev.codeplex.com/
CKS Dev adds very useful features to Visual Studio for SharePoint projects. It accelerates custom solutions deployment and helps in developing some components that are not proposed out of the box by Visual Studio 2010.
As you can see, a lot of valuable project items are made available:

On top of that, some extra contextual menu items are available and are very useful:

Most of these options allow you to deploy quickly components without being forced to deploy the full WSP. It is particularly useful when deploying artifacts such as .aspx pages, master pages etc…and very handy when debugging code-behind from SandBoxed , Farm solutions and even Timer Jobs.
It’s definitely an added value for every SharePoint developer.

Developer Dashboard

Documentation : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff512745.aspx

This one is built-in in SharePoint 2010 and makes it easy to take some performance metrics, helps identifying heavy components and understanding what’s going on behind the scenes since it also shows how SharePoint queries its SQL databases.
Once enabled on the page, you get some results about the overall page payload, the database queries and much more other metrics:

Combining the use of the Dashboard with the built-in SPMonitoredScope class helps in getting a precise idea on how your components perform. As a practice, for important actions, you can imagine that kind of patterns in your code: