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Jolt Awards: The Best Programming Utilities

The Jolt Judges, July 29, 2013 The top utilities that solve annoying development problems.
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Jolt Productivity Award: LINQPad

LINQPad is an amazing tool whose claim to fame is interactive support for .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ). However, it is actually a general-purpose C# REPL that also allows you to use SQL. If you are a .NET developer, LINQPad is indispensable. Its user interface has a DB connections pane, saved queries pane, and a tabbed main pane with output. In LINQPad, you can bang out some code, select a part of it, and execute it. You are not limited to querying and can modify your data. My favorite feature is the Dump() function, which takes arbitrary objects and displays them in an easy-to-explore representation in the output pane.

Unfortunately, LINQPad runs only on Window, even though Mono brought .NET to Linux and Mac a long time ago. But the price for the standard edition (free) is right. If you want auto-completion as you enter code, you'll have to pay for the pro edition.

— Gigi Sayfan


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