This section describes different tools available for Sitecore developers, useful from installation to deployment.
Sitecore Instance Manager (SIM) is an open source tool to manage your Sitecore instances locally. It's the best-suited tool to manage Sitecore instances while working on multiple Sitecore projects. It provides the following features:
Installing, locating, backing up, restoring, reinstalling, or deleting Sitecore products
Installing Sitecore modules and packages and exporting and importing Sitecore websites
Opening websites in the browser, opening Visual Studio projects, checking log files, stopping/starting application pools, and editing the host file
Providing an API and plugin engine so that you can extend it for any of your needs
You can download it from https://goo.gl/VG71PV.
Sitecore Rocks is a Visual Studio plugin and also available as a standalone application. It is aimed to be useful for developers for developing purposes in local environments. It helps content editing in all Sitecore databases, administrating different tasks, and so on without logging into the Sitecore client. You just need to configure your Sitecore instance once, which requires a data provider – Hard Rock Web Service (which it will install automatically), host, credentials, and location details.
It also provides different Visual Studio templates to create the Sitecore Rocks plugin and server components. It also helps developers in creating classes for commands, processors, rules, renderers, and so on from their predefined templates.
You can install this plugin from Visual Studio extensions or download it from http://goo.gl/pk2rzW.
There are many decompiling tools available to decompile or dissemble Sitecore and other .NET assemblies, such as Red Gate Reflector, ILSpy, dotPeek, and others. Dissembling becomes very useful to get the source code compiled into assembly files. Sitecore provides a vast architecture. Being an advanced developer, customizing or extending user interfaces or backend architecture needs a clear understanding of Sitecore APIs; for this, decompilers can be the best friend of developers. You can read more about reflecting on Sitecore at https://goo.gl/L9ZHKM.
Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) reduces your deployment time by allowing you to leverage a continuous integration or automated deployment strategy. It allows you to leverage source control, which means that all of the constant changes made during a usual project merge seamlessly. It also allows you to create an environment in which you can easily and quickly move code from your local environment all the way through your development workflow. It secures your changes among your team and throughout time by making sure that your work is properly controlled and maintained in source control. You can read more at https://www.teamdevelopmentforsitecore.com/.
Unicorn is an open source utility, designed to simplify the deployment of Sitecore items across environments automatically. It's a robust tool for developers working on dedicated Sitecore databases who want to version-control their item changes for backup, moving to other databases, deployments, and so on. You can read more about this at https://github.com/kamsar/Unicorn.
Razl allows developers to have a complete side-by-side comparison between two Sitecore databases. You can compare Sitecore databases quickly, easily, and in an organized fashion. Razl allows you to find that one missing template, move it to the correct database, and not have to spend hours looking for what's wrong. You can read more at http://www.razl.net/.
Glass.Mapper is a fully featured object-relational mapping (ORM) framework that's useful to improve your Sitecore development. It provides easier ways to read and write to fields, create parent-child and link relationships, search in Sitecore, perform ad hoc queries, map to and from standard and customized .NET types directly, map to both your custom interfaces and classes, and much more. It supports both MVC and Web Forms. It helps you stay away from repetitive code, but it comes with a limitation: it can affect performance if compared to native Sitecore APIs. You can read more at http://www.glass.lu/.
Automated build and automated deployment play a vital role while working on multiple projects and giving quick deliveries. Apart from TDS, you have plenty of software available in the market; you can choose the best based on your project requirements:
Apart from Sitecore Experience Platform (XP), there are many products and modules provided by Sitecore to integrate Sitecore with third-party applications or automating marketers' jobs, which become very useful in winning customers. You can download these products and modules from https://dev.sitecore.net/Downloads.