Tools & Processes

Development of our softare is undertaken using industry standard tools and processes. Most of our products are built on the Microsoft .NET platform using Microsoft Visual Studio with SourceSafe source control.

We use an agile development process supported by continuous unit testing with nUnit, integrated into into our development environment using TestDriven .NET. We also carry out static code analysis with Microsoft FxCop. This ensures that our released code is of the highest quality and conforms to industry guidelines for best practise .

Also important to our development are Lutz Roeders Reflector which enables us to probe the framework libraries to ensure we use them as efficiently as possible. We develop and test regular expressions using The Regulator.

Debugging

Our principle debugging tool is of course Microsoft Visual Studio, but we believe that the only way to produce high quality software is to ensure that every aspect of our products behaviour is fully examined in the debug process, and that all problems are fixed at their root cause - we never simply paper over the cracks.

To this end, we use a wide range of additional debugging tools. System level debugging is supported by many invaluable tools from SysInternals, and we debug and verify the network behaviour of all our software using the Ethereal network protocol analyser.

We cannot recommend highly enough the book (and associated tools) Debugging Applications for Microsoft® .NET and Microsoft Windows by the BugSlayer himself, John Robbins. This is our debugging bible and we use many of the tools and macros supplied with it.

Documentation

All of our application products are supplied with a PDF QuickStart guide to ensure that you can get the best out of our products straight away.  Full documentation is provided in PDF or HTML Help format.

Documentation for software components is as important as the code itself, and therefore our documentation is developed right alongside the code it describes. We use nDoc to compile our documentation from comments embedded in the source code by the software developers themselves. This ensures that the people most qualified to document the behaviour of our code write the documentation!

Of course, before any product (or product update) is released, the documentation is thoroughly reviewed to ensure it is complete, comprehensive, comprehensible and concise. Oh, and useful! This documentation is then supplied as a PDF or HTML Help file with the component installation, online on our website, and in XML form so that help is available through IntelliSense in your development tools. We also supply a PDF format QuickStart guide.

The Team

We keep up to date with industry journals including MSDN Magazine, Code Magazine, and the Visual Systems Journal.

We also attend industry conferences such as DevWeek and vendor-sponsored events from big names including Microsoft and Compuware.

Finally, where appropriate we use technical training from providers such as DevelopMentor, Learning Tree and TeleLogic.

Ian Stevenson is the principle author for our software, and also writes for the industry press and delivers training courses.