Tools

Ok, so it is time to talk about the tools, what can you use to improve the productivity of your team?, many people will talk about sophisticated tools to manage the whole development cycle as well as tools for refactoring, etc, etc, etc. OK, not everybody can afford these tools and many of these tools need an army of consultants in order to be used effectively, so if you have the financial support go for them, for those of us that don't have them we need to go basic, we need to use libraries that enforce a standard way of working and remove the biggest architecture questions from the table, I have 2 tools that I love:

1. CSLA.NET, from Rocky Lhotka. This library is the foundation of his book ,This to me is the perfect framework, royalty free, an awesome community and a full reference book with real life examples!

2. Microsoft's Pattern and Practice enterprise library. This is a set of libraries that implement best practices for .NET, just like CSLA is royalty free, a great community and many resources.

I'll talk in detail on these frameworks on my next posts, I'll include links to the different communities, blogs and another resources that I found, as well as I'll write about my own experience.