In-Depth
2011 Visual Studio Magazine Readers Choice Winners
The readers have spoken, and told us what development tools they can't live without.
It's that time of year! Every fall, Visual Studio Magazine asks its readers to recognize the best third-party tools for professional developers who earn their livelihoods working with code in Microsoft Visual Studio and related tooling. Microsoft provides some great platforms and tools—the Microsoft .NET Framework, Silverlight, ASP.NET, SharePoint, SQL Server and Windows Azure, to name a few—but third-party vendors fill in some crucial gaps, providing tools that boost productivity to a degree that's just not available with the built-in tools.
This year's VSM Readers Choice Awards span 28 categories, with a few former categories merging into others: Bug, Defect & Feature Tracking joins Collaboration, Project Management & Agile Solutions, for example. New categories were also added, as more tools emerge in areas such as cloud development.
The 19th-annual Readers Choice Awards are based on the voting of Visual Studio Magazine subscribers, whose hard-won expertise and hands-on experience offer invaluable insights into the best development tools. In September, we invited a select subset of readers to fill out survey ballots and identify the top third-party tools from a list of more than 600 developer products. This year, we also asked our expert panel of VSM columnists to weigh in on the Readers Choice Award Winners and tell us which of the winning products they valued the most.
Like past years, VSM recognizes the top Readers Choice Award winner in each category and gives Merit Awards for two runners up. In the case of a tie, all the winning products are listed. Check out the categories to see the top tools chosen by your peers and let us know if your must-have tools are part of these rankings. If you participated in the survey, thanks for voting!