SlickEdit Tools

posted on 06/03/08 at 10:58:49 pm by Joel Ross

One of our new advertisers starting this month with The Lounge is SlickEdit, and as part of that, they offered us a chance to try out their SlickEdit Tools products. I love tools that'll help me be more productive, so I jumped at the chance. SlickEdit Tools is actually two products - Editing and Versioning. Both integrate with with Visual Studio, and since that's where I spend much of my time, that works for me.

I haven't had as much time writing code in the last month as I would like, so I've just been playing with it and haven't really had a chance to integrate it into my daily development habits. But one of the tools I did find very useful was the Auto Code Document Viewer, which takes your XML documentation and shows you what a help file would look like - as if you used NDoc or Sand Castle. It even allows you to save off the HTML pages for later use. This will make developing the NuSoft Framework easier, as I now have an easy way to see what our documentation looks like, without going through a long process to get it.

There's also a nice regular expression tool, with integration to RegExLib.com, which I could see being very helpful - I suck at writing regular expressions, but I understand their usefulness. Building them is a pain, and having an integrated tool to me is more useful than a separate application like The Regulator.

I do have one complaint so far about it, and I'll admit right now that it's nitpicky. They add a feature that allows you to count lines of code, which gives you a nice graph:

LOCReport

While useful, it's not something I want to check all the time. But I end up doing it because for 9 years now, when I want to go to the properties of something in the solution explorer, I do this from the keyboard:

Ctrl-Alt-L, Right-Click Key, Up Arrow, Enter

With the tools installed, here's the new right click menu:

 RightClick

As you can see, instead of "Properties", I get the line of code report. Like I said, it's minor, but it's a hard habit to break!

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Categories: Software