SharePoint Developer Tools - Get Your Gears

There are several must-have developer tools, which every SharePoint Developer must have in his or her Arsenal. This is done in order to boost productivity, while developing solutions on SharePoint platform.

A few tools, which are my personal favorites are also listed below:

CAML Designer 2013

CAML Designer can generate the CAML Query Stubs, based on the inputs, provided by the developer and can quickly give a handle on even a complex query formations.

It is not just about the formation of the queries but also offers the code transition from the actual CAML query to

• Corresponding Server Side Object Model Code.
• Corresponding Managed Client Side Object Model Code.
• Corresponding JSOM & REST API Calls.
• Corresponding PowerShell Code.
  
  
  

Download Path: http://biwug-web.sharepoint.com/SitePages/Caml_designer.aspx

SharePoint Manager 2013

SharePoint Manager has quite a simple and intuitive interface, which allows you to quickly and easily navigate down the farm and investigate settings, properties, schema XML and so on. Most of the things in your SharePoint environment can be investigated from this tool.

This tool allows you to quickly navigate the Site Hierarchy and objects. You can also get a quick handle on schemas of the list, fields and in addition, the object properties like Object GUIDs, Object Titles and so on.

Download Path: http://spm.codeplex.com

ULS Viewer

ULS Viewer allows you to look into SharePoint ULS logs in real time by parsing the logs. The information (Correlation ID, Date Time Stamp, Event Source Process and so on ) exposed by this tool is really useful for the productive debugging capabilities.

With the evolution of SharePoint 2013 Developer, Dashboard also includes the capabilities of reading & parsing ULS logs. Developer Dashboard contains a separate tab by the name “ULS”, where we can see the ULS log entries.

Download Path: http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=44020

CKS Dev

CSK Dev is a Visual Studio extension, which adds a bunch of new project items for SharePoint projects, which are really helpful in increasing the productivity of a developer.

Extension Project Items includes:

• WCF Service SPI template.
• Contextual Web Part SPI template.
• Branding SPI template.
• ASHX SPI template.
• Upgrade Solution Step.
• Restart IIS Step.
• Copy To SharePoint Root step.

There are many more…

Download Path: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/cf1225b4-aa83-4282-b4c6-34feec8fc5ec

Color Palette Tool for Branding

Color Palette allows you create composed looks for SharePoint 2013.

Download Path: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38182

SharePoint 2013 Search Tool

SharePoint Search Tool allows you to create and test SharePoint Search Keyword Query, backed by SharePoint REST API paradigm. It also allows you to analyze the query stats and adjust them, as per the required output.

Download Path: http://sp2013searchtool.codeplex.com/

Fiddler

Fiddler is a Web proxy, which allows you to debug Web traffic, do Performance Testing, HTTP/HTTPs Traffic Recording, Security Testing and so on.

The use of Fiddler becomes necessary now with the evolution of SharePoint 2013, which is more focused on the development strategies, based on Client Side Scripting Technologies.

Download Path: http://fiddler2.com/get-fiddler

SPCAF – SharePoint Code Analysis Framework

SharePoint Code Analysis Framework helps to validate your custom SharePoint Solutions and apps against best coding practices prescribed by the industry, drawn by various industry standards.

This framework can be really helpful to let you verify if your custom solutions are stable, comply with the company policies, follow coding best practices, are well designed, maintainable and several others.

Download Path: http://www.spcaf.com

.NET Reflector from Red Gate

.NET Reflector is one of the best tools I have ever used for understanding the code of Third Party DLLs for which I did not have the source code.

Reflector allows you to look into the DLLs to see the code encapsulating inside it to understand its functioning.

Download Path: http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-development/reflector/

PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio

This is an excellent Visual Studio Extension for PowerShell, which enables the code intellisence for PowerShell Scripts within Visual Studio Editor.

Download Path: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c9eb3ba8-0c59-4944-9a62-6eee37294597

SPFastDeploy

This tool is specially designed to enhance productivity while working with SharePoint app.

This tool is best suited to push the code changes quickly to SharePoint Apps without re-deploying the Apps. This can save a significant amount of time during the app development.

Download Path: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/9e03d0f5-f931-4125-a5d1-7c1529554fbd

Advanced REST Client plugin for Google Chrome

This is a Chrome Plugin, which allows you to configure and investigate REST Queries by configuring and executing REST API Call through the tool UI. It also allows us to look for the stats of the REST queries in execution.

Download Path: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-client/hgmloofddffdnphfgcellkdfbfbjeloo?hl=en-US

Postman – REST Client plugin for Google Chrome

This is again a Chrome Plugin, which allows you to deal with REST. It calls same as “Advanced REST Client plugin for Google Chrome”.

It is just a matter of choice, which one you may prefer to work with.

Download Path: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman-rest-client/fdmmgilgnpjigdojojpjoooidkmcomcm

SharePoint 2013 Client Browser

This is a similar tool as SharePoint Manager with the only difference that it allows us to connect to SharePoint Sites on a remote basis, using Client APIs. Thus, there is no more need to login to SharePoint Server to the Browser SharePoint Site Objects, using this tool.

Download Path: https://spcb.codeplex.com/

smtp4dev

This is an awesome tool for testing SharePoint Send Mail Functionalities and it does not matter if it is Custom or OOB functionality, that we are testing.

It is used to verify if the SharePoint is sending mails to the recipients properly. This tool intercepts the mails that we're sending to the recipients by SharePoint and allows you to view them in its own UI.

Download Path: http://smtp4dev.codeplex.com/

PowerGUI

PowerGUI is one of the best tools available for PowerShell programming. It provides an intelliSense support for writing PowerShell Scripts. At the same time, it provides a lot of useful Windows for the debugging purposes.

Download Path: http://powergui.org/downloads.jspa

SharePoint Software Factory

The SharePoint Software Factory is a Visual Studio Extension, which helps SharePoint Beginners, as well as experienced developers to create, manage and deploy SharePoint solutions without having to know the schema internals of SharePoint Artifacts.

Following is the list of a few features offered by this extension:

There are several others.

For a detailed list of the available features, you can visit : http://www.matthiaseinig.de/docs/SPSF/OutputHTML/SPSF_RECIPES_INDEX.html

Download Path: https://spsf.codeplex.com/

SharePoint Solution Deployer

SharePoint Solution Deployer helps you to deploy SharePoint solution packages (.WSP) to multiple SharePoint environments. It deploys, retracts and upgrades one or more WSPs and can be extended to perform the additional custom tasks in PowerShell before or afterwards.

It provides a simple XML configuration file, which allows you to define the deployment environment by using the variables i.e. to perform different actions on different URLs, depending on which farm you are currently deploying.

Download Path: https://spsd.codeplex.com/

SharePoint Diagnostic Studio 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Diagnostic Studio 2010 (SPDiag version 3.0) was created to simplify and standardize the troubleshooting of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 products and to provide a unified view of the collected data.

This tool can be used for:

• Gathering the relevant information from a farm.
• Displaying the results in a meaningful way.
• Identifying performance issues.
• Sharing or exporting the collected data.
• Providing the reports for analysis.

There are other features too.

Download Path: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh144782(v=office.14).aspx

SPServices

SPServices is a jQuery library, which abstracts SharePoint’s Web Services and makes them easy to use. It also includes the functions , which use the various Web Service operations to provide more useful (and cool) capabilities. It works entirely on the client side and requires no Server to be installed.

Download Path: http://spservices.codeplex.com/

SharePoint LogViewer

SharePoint Log Viewer is a Windows Application to read and filter Microsoft SharePoint ULS Logs.

It offers the following key features-

• View multiple SharePoint log files at once.
• Search by any field.
• Filter the log by any field.
• File drag & drop support.
• Live monitoring for the entire farm.
• Export the filtered log entries.
• Bookmark the log entries.
• Get popup notification of SharePoint log events from the system tray.
• Receive the Email notifications on the errors.
• Redirect the log entries to the event log.
• Supports SharePoint 2007, 2010 and 2013.

Download Path: http://sharepointlogviewer.codeplex.com/

FxCop

FxCop is an Application, which analyzes the managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as a possible design, localization, performance and the security improvements. Many of the issues concern violations of the programming and design rules, set forth in the Design Guidelines, which are Microsoft guidelines to write the robust and easy to maintain code, using .NET framework.

Download Path: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429476(v=vs.80).aspx

JavaScript Beautifier

This online tool is used to beautify, unpack or De-obfuscate JavaScript and HTML, make JSON/JSONP readable etc.

Download Path: http://jsbeautifier.org/

JSON Formatter & Validator

This is an online tool, which can be used to validate JSON Packets.

Download Path: https://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/

Being a SharePoint Developer, I can say, using these tools should be second nature for SharePoint Developers to enhance their development capabilities, which results in quick delivery turn around.

Hope you all find it helpful.