DevPartner Studio Professional Edition
Compuware

Compuware continues the steady evolution of this long-time developer’s friend. DevPartner 7.0’s design enables you to track and trace the behavior of a failed transaction—such as a 500 error—from the browser to the server to the database and back to the browser across multiple processes. This edition also supports Visual Studio .NET, including C#, Visual Basic .NET and ASP .NET, as well as tight integration into the Visual Studio .NET IDE, adding to DevPartner’s already full capabilities of performance analysis, code coverage analysis, detection of incorrect API usage and detection of inefficient code. You say you’re not a pure .NET developer? No problem—DevPartner works its magic in mixed environments, too. 1997 Jolt Award winner.

—Roland Racko

RoboHelp X3
eHelp

If you think enough of your users to provide them with good online help—no matter what platform you’re programming to—RoboHelp X3 (Version .11) should be on your short list of tools, if not a list of one. It creates WinHelp, HTML Help, WebHelp, JavaHelp, Oracle Help and printed documentation—all from the same source files. That source, by the way, can be Microsoft Word documents, Framemaker, HTML, existing help files or help projects for other tools. For Windows help formats, precooked specialized templates are provided for common programs and tools like Excel, Visual C++ and Delphi; Microsoft Word is the native editor. If you’re doing Web applications, RoboHelp HTML is included, a stand-alone tool to create cross-platform, server-based HTML help—and to analyze usage patterns after you’ve deployed it.

—Rick Wayne

Anthill
Urbancode

Agile processes such as XP emphasize frequent builds and communication within the development group, along with early introduction of testing into the lifecycle. Organizations committed to version control systems such as CVS, SourceSafe, ClearCase, but lacking integration with build facilities, will find that Anthill 1.5 offers a way to get control of the build process, including recovery and reproduction of any previous build. An Anthill-controlled build can not only check out code and build it, but also run unit tests and calculate source code metrics. Team members can access build results, as well as ancillary documentation, at an Anthill-updated project website.

—Warren Keuffel