Free tools you may have missed

Scott Mitchell in our Toolbox column has covered quite a few free tools you’ll love. Here are some you may have missed from Scott and some of our other authors as well. Check back again for more free tools next time.

SubSonic is an application toolset that is centered on its ability to completely generate your data access layer. Unlike some other Object Relation Mapping (ORM) frameworks, SubSonic takes the approach of generating and compiling your data access layer as opposed to performing a reflection-based mapping at run time (and for this reason, some would call it a code generation tool rather than an ORM).

Roy Osherove has created a number of free tools that make up for the lack of regular expression support in Visual Studio. The most well-known of these tools is Regulator, a standalone regular expression editor that includes color syntax highlighting, IntelliSense-like hints, a code snippets window, and search access to RegExLib.com, an online library of common regular expression patterns.

Scott Mitchell says Pixie 1.0, by Nattyware, is one of the best color pickers he has come across. And it’s free too. 

 

Finally, check out FxCop, which lets you check a .NET assembly for compliance using a number of different rules. FxCop comes with a set number of rules created by Microsoft, but you can also write your own rules. James Avery wrote about it here, but you have to get it here.