Product Review: Telerik's JustCode

Visual Studio 2012 is a robust IDE that allows developers to design and code Windows and web-based applications. However, you need additional tools that can examine the code at a deeper level, perform tasks that simplify coding, and fix errors on the go.

Telerik's JustCode is a Visual Studio extension that provides on-the-spot code analysis and error checking, smart navigation, and refactoring and is accessible from within the Visual Studio IDE.

One of JustCode's unique features is it quickly checks modified code for errors and displays them in Visual Studio. The product includes real-time code analysis, which is not available with Visual Studio 2012, and provides quick fixes for all errors found by the code-analysis engine. Developers can resolve errors from within the Visual Studio code editor.

The product includes powerful code navigation and search functionality (including the ability to perform search operations with camel case), which helps developers quickly find and highlight symbol usages, definitions, types, members, and errors. The product keeps track of previous search results and allows you to navigate them using the Find Results window.

JustCode ships with a refactoring module that helps improve code by changing its structure while maintaining its behaviour. It also ships with significant typing-feature improvements that not only allow developers to write code quickly and without any bugs, but also help avoid costly runtime errors.

The product allows you to clean unused code, and it can be executed either solution-wide or across various languages. It also ships with an agile code formatter that allows you to format code against either a set of rules defined in the product options or by reusing Visual Studio default formatting options.

JustCode allows developers to automatically create different type members with its powerful code-generation engine. It also lets you create templates with commonly used code fragments or by surrounding selected code fragments with a meaningful code block. You can take templates even further by storing Visual Studio and JustCode settings in the cloud so that developers can use them on any machine.

Telerik provides excellent technical support through a ticket-based system and also maintains an active blog where JustCode team members post tips and articles that enhance the usage of not only JustCode, but other products as well.

JustCode also has open-source extensions that let you create specific, custom features and supports Microsoft Test Runner as well as all sorts of .NET testing frameworks such as MSTest, xUnit, NUnit, MbUnit, Gallio, MSpec, Jasmine, and QUnit.

In my opinion, JustCode is a very useful tool for .NET developers who want to avoid costly errors and maximize productivity. JustCode teaches developers the best practices for writing, organizing, and formatting code in a minimum amount of time.