Skip to main content

Free tools for .NET developers

As a developer, I’m always looking for tools that make my life easier and improve my productivity. Last week I discovered this list(135784_.NET_Free_Dev_Tools-table v6_080111_0) with over 50 free tools.

It contains a some of the most popular and useful free software development tools available. The vast majority of the tools listed in the table are geared toward .NET development, but there are a few others thrown in for those who are doing cross-platform development.

50 tools are listed in nine categories that represent a cross-section of the types of tools most widely available:

  • Code-generation/editing/templates
  • Content management systems (CMSs)
  • Controls/Components
  • Data access and Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)
  • Documentation & Project Management
  • Performance Analysis/Management
  • Software Configuration Management/Version Control
  • Testing and Debugging
  • Visual Studio add-ins
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

The role of ActivitySource in OpenTelemetry for .NET

While doing some pair programming to integrate OpenTelemetry tracing to a .NET application, we had a discussion on how to use the ActivitySource . It looks simple. You new one up, give it a name, start an activity, done. The discussion started when we added a second ActivitySource with the exact same name in a different class. This made us wonder: "Are we duplicating traces now? Is this a memory leak? Do we need a singleton?" So we decided to dig deeper. This post is what we learned… What ActivitySource actually is ActivitySource is part of System.Diagnostics , not part of the OpenTelemetry NuGet packages. Microsoft built tracing primitives directly into the BCL, and OpenTelemetry's .NET SDK simply listens to them. This is why you can add distributed tracing to a library without taking a dependency on OpenTelemetry at all. An ActivitySource is a factory for Activity objects, and an Activity is .NET's name for what OpenTelemetry calls a span.(don’t ask m...
Read more