Coffee & Code: Episode 10 - Developer Tools - Acumatica Cloud ERP

In this episode, we have Sergey Nikomarov, a Senior Developer on our Platform Engineering team along with some of our Acumatica Developer MVPs talking about their favorite developer tools.  We also shared some tips around debugging and useful settings in Visual Studio were also covered.

Below the embedded video recording, you will find an comprehensive list of links to many of the tools that were discussed in the episode.

Enjoy and happy coding!

Developer Tools & Visual Studio Features discussed in the episode are enumerated below

1. IntelliCode – an ML based code completion and refactorings https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/
2. Old but useful Code Snippets feature https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/code-snippets?view=vs-2022
3. Customizable coloring schema https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-change-fonts-and-colors-in-visual-studio?view=vs-2022
4. Customizable keyboard shortcuts. I’m going to describe few examples https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/default-keyboard-shortcuts-in-visual-studio?view=vs-2022

5. Code diagnostics and refactorings.

6. Multiple carets feature – allow to select occurrences of some text and edit them all at once, very useful for refactoring and edit of big chunks of API that follows a specific naming schema.
   https://www.meziantou.net/visual-studio-tips-and-tricks-multi-line-and-multi-cursor-editing.htm

7. Visual Studio provides good debugging experience

8. Other VS Features

9. VS is a platform for customizations. There is also a convenient extensions gallery – VS marketplace. Naming a few more VS extensions here:
   • Resharper, the most popular VS extension
     https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

   • Extensions that Sergey Nikomarav uses:

Other Developer Tools:

1. SQL Server Management Studio – use to access MS SQL databases. I actually use two versions of SSMS because the capability to debug SQL transactions was removed from the latest SSMS 18
   https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms?view=sql-server-ver15
2. Lightweight code editors – VS Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/) and Notepad++ (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/).
3. ngrok tool for simple configuration of network tunnels to a local developer instance. Useful during the work with mobile version of Acumatica
   https://ngrok.com/
4. Some tools to draw diagrams:
   • draw.io for simple diagrams https://www.draw.io/
   • plantuml.com for more advanced UML-like diagrams https://plantuml.com/
5. Pixie – a tiny color picker to pick a color of any pixel on your screen http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php
6. Nimble text – a really flexible text generator that generates a text from the given data placed into the provided template. Can be used for SQL commands generation (multiple insert commands) or C# API generation (for example if you need to add a lot of properties/field that differ only by name)
   https://nimbletext.com/
7. Postman to debug REST APIs.
   https://www.postman.com/
8. Telerik JustDecompile
   https://www.telerik.com/products/decompiler.aspx
9. JSON FORMATTER
   https://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/#
10. Attach To All The Things
    https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=thebread.AttachToAllTheThings