Microsoft Tools Every Development Teams Should Use

Microsoft as an organization inspires confidence in the world of developers and businesses. Microsoft has developed software for a variety of use cases to suit every aspect of software development. Software development tools are programs used to create, manage, or debug applications and other software. There are paid and free software development tools, but free tools are usually available with limited functionality.

There are different types of software development tools from Microsoft. We have covered a wide list of the best and most useful software development tools.

GitHub is one of the popular development platforms out there. Defined as a web-based hosting service in the Git repository, it acts as Google Drive through which users can find code. You can upload your project to the platform (public or private) to protect it or to share it with others.

The community is quite large, and the project base is impressive. This can be a great place for anyone looking for mutual development. GitHub isn't a software creation tool, but it does help you with that.

Most notably, Microsoft Teams is an excellent tool for enhancing the collaboration and skills of your development team. Using teams in a development project ensures that all team members know the development, testing, and implementation activities.

A continual series of team discussions ensure that a history of project activities and decisions is maintained. These discussions make it easy to review past actions and expedite new team members quickly. Teams also drastically reduced email usage and extremely long email threads that everyone had to fear searching for their folders.

All of us are familiar with the popular framework – ASP.NET Core. This was developed as an open-source version of ASP.NET. The web development platform was developed to create websites, web applications, and web services. The advantage of Core is that it runs on a variety of OS that includes macOS, Linux, and Windows. The further advantage of Core is the ability of multiple versions to exist side by side on the same server. This is good news to the developers because one app can adapt to the latest version on which it was developed and the rest of the apps could run on the version they were tested on. The Core can also integrate with modern UI frameworks and can be hosted on multiple platforms. Eventually, you also get a smaller deployment footprint using ASP.NET Core.

Azure DevOps provides support services to development teams for work planning, collaborative code development, and application creation and deployment. Azure DevOps cultivates a culture and a set of processes that bring developers, project managers, and employees together to complete software development.

Azure also integrates with most of the leading tools out there and is a great opportunity to set up the DevOps toolchain.

Visual Studio Code is Microsoft's free source code editor for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Features include debugging support, syntax highlighting, smart code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and built-in Git. Developers find it easy to efficiently code their applications.

Its purpose is to provide only the tools developers need for a fast cycle of building and debugging code and leaving more complex workflows to a complete IDE such as the Visual Studio IDE. The IDE also provides capabilities for team collaboration and enhances the process of application development. 

Microsoft Visio is software that can be used to draw a variety of diagrams. The types of diagrams include flow charts, organization charts, building plans, floor plans, data flow diagrams, process flowcharts, business process modeling, navigation charts, 3D maps, and more.

Visio is part of the MS Office family and shares the text, color; data feeds directly from Excel and Access. Visio also provides a library of templates and shapes for the multiple charts you would make. 

No list of the best software development tools can be complete without mentioning Atom, a well-known text editor that is surprisingly free to use. These open-source tools can be of great help to developers.

You can customize it to your needs without having to change configuration files. This software is well known for supporting all major operating systems, including Windows, OS X, and Linux. The most important feature of this tool is the auto-complete feature which lets you type faster. Atom simplifies management thanks to its great browser functionality. You can even split the user interface into multiple screens to edit and compare multiple files.

Below is a responsive framework ideal for use with CSS, JS, and HTML to design templates for typography, forms, tables, buttons, and image carousels, to name a few. This also has some javascript plugins. It is equipped with several built-in components that make work easier. Bootstrap has lost its popularity lately, but it's still pretty good. It offers pre-built blocks of code and is good at maintaining consistency. Make sure you take advantage of the unique customization options.

HTML5 Builder has many likes, which it uses for developing mobile and web applications. 

It's universal and one of the fastest software development tools out there. This makes it easy to develop cross-platform applications and is quite good at collaboration. Many developers use it to build applications that require geolocation due to built-in tools.

SQL is a relational database management system. The database comes in with high levels of security with the use of encryption. The database is also very easy to install. SQL Server provides methods to handle data fetch, data storage, data recovery, and data restoration. As organizations have multiple needs for data storage, MYSQL comes with multiple server editions that fit into any existing model.

To conclude, we have given you a set of tools from the Microsoft stack to help you develop applications and products. We recommend that you explore Microsoft Stack as they are robust, scalable, and easy to use. These tools could be a key asset in improving the productivity of your agile development teams.