In today’s world, it’s all about speed and accuracy and SharePoint development is no different in this. To help the SharePoint developer community a large number of tools and utilities have come up and evolved into what we call ‘must have tools’ for a SharePoint developer. We performed various internal searches among our development team and a number of such powerful tools were listed out. After a careful evaluation and weighing on the merits of using tools here are the top 6 listed:
1. SharePoint Search query tool
2. SharePoint Manager 2013
3. CAML Query builder
4. ULS Viewer
5. Fiddler
6. CKS Dev
1. SharePoint Search Query Tool
Searching and finding out the relevant information is the most important for every project. SharePoint is no different in building and sharing information in humongous volume. For building this efficient search, it is always challenging to write queries for the developers. This is time-consuming and can even lead to undesirable results. This tool comes with a predefined set of Query options. The developers can build as well as the queries and their results in the needed format between JSON and XML, on the go while working on huge SharePoint farm. Therefore, these tools simplify your search requirements.
2. SharePoint Manager 2013
Exploring SharePoint Object Model of the project is an obvious task while working on any solution. This tool helps in seeing the SharePoint farm structure. This helps in visualizing the schema stored in the database. The users with server access can only use this tool, which can be used to see the complete object structure and underline properties and their values.
Also Read: How to Optimize Your Sharepoint On-premises Plan?3. CAML Query Builder
There is no custom development project in SharePoint that does not involve pulling data from SharePoint list and libraries. This can be done with the help of CAML queries. A significant part of the development effort goes in writing and optimizing the CAML Queries. An effective CAML query builder tool, along with saving your development time can also validate your results as you are writing the queries.
4. ULS Viewer
While working on projects SharePoint log files have a huge number of logs on each request. Therefore, it becomes hard to identify and debug the problem manually. ULS Viewer helps to perform this job in a very short time. It gives multiple filters to refine the logs and get the needed lines of statement based on correlation id and levels. Summing up, if you are configuring, deploying or debugging the SharePoint project, then the ULS Log Viewer helps to search the logs instantly and thus saves the time in resolving the errors.
Also Read: Sharepoint Is Wonderful than You Ever Thought!5. Fiddler
Debugging the client side interface for all the requests and responses is a time-consuming process for a developer. Finding out the various web sessions, their responses traffic etc are very tedious tasks. With Fiddler, you can easily analyze the statistics of the request and downloaded data which helps us in improving the performance of the website. The request traffic can also be recorded for the further use. Therefore, if you are looking for a tool for rapid debugging and client-side testing you can use Fiddler.
6. CKS Dev
This is a plugin for Visual Studio which is a killer feature that you can adjust without. This has been built by a team of awesome folks in the community as an extension to Visual Studio and now it has support for 2013 as well. It allows you to manage your development routines more efficiently while you are on the coding adventure. It also adds a bunch of new project items for your SharePoint projects and it contributes to an overall satisfactory SharePoint development story.
Also Read: Things to Consider while Planning your SharePoint IntranetThe above-mentioned are the 6 must-have SharePoint development tools we would like to mention. We are happy to share our experience in having used these tools, which can help us in increasing our efficiency. Though there are many tools available on the market we would prefer these tools to be used extensively which are a part of our projects and success stories. You can refer and recommend more tools you are using and in what various ways they are contributing. Let’s share this and get the maximum advantage to build the SharePoint development team more efficient and productive.
Aufait is a SharePoint development company which provides a wide range of SharePoint services to provide our global clients with user friendly, feature-rich SharePoint applications leveraging Microsoft SharePoint functionalities.