Code Review with help from the SlickEdit Tools, Version Control Toolbox

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Code Review with help from the SlickEdit Tools, Version Control Toolbox

“Hello World” - Let’s Do a Code Review With SlickEdit Tools (Part 1)

“As a developer, I look for tools that help me get things done quicker, and make tasks easier. This series of articles shows you how to take a handful of the features in SlickEdit Tools for Microsoft® Visual Studio® and use them to effectively put together and perform a code review.

I can’t say that I’ve met too many developers that eagerly looked forward to reviewing code. Most developers understand the importance of code reviews, but many have experienced the pain of poorly run code reviews. Although SlickEdit Tools does not have a “code review” feature, it provides several features that can be used together to make a code review run smoothly. A well done code review process can be the difference between developer loathing and developer buy-in.

Because code reviews are such a big topic, this article will focus on some of the steps that lead up to a code review. Code reviews typically focus on the work of a single developer, so we’ll start there. We are going to be code reviewing the developer with ID SLICKEDIT\shackett (or Scott) in source control, and we’ll be reviewing his work since March 3, 2008, which is the date of our last (fictional) release.

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Have you maybe been looking at the SlickEdit Tools, glancing at the Version Control Toolbox and thinking, “well that looks kind of neat, but how does it really help me?”

Scott (who rocks by the way) has written up a cool article/post that not only shows some of the coolness that is SlickEdit Tools/Version Control Toolbox, but also walks us through a fairly real world usage scenario (well it is real world for me as I’ve wanted to do something like this… )

I’ve been play with the latest version of the Version Control Toolbox for a bit now, and it fairly well rocks! On one machine I’ll connect to three different CodePlex servers (for personal work) and two different TFS servers (for work work). And the Version Control Toolbox handles that pretty painlessly. So far it just seems to work. My favorite kind of software. :)

Now what I need to do is to stop playing with it and actually learn it, its shortcuts and really use it.