Tools That Can Help in Building and Optimizing ASP.NET Sites

When setting up a website, web tools are important to put a website together as it not only simplifies a complicated task, but also saves time. You might be surprised that even though ASP.NET is not free there are
free tools for building ASP.NET sites.These tools also work with web forms and MVC.


HTML Spell Checker

What Visual Studio lacks is a built-in spell checker. It's a mystery why they did not add a spell checker, but the good thing is that a former member of ASP.NET wrote a free spell checker that you can use to check ASP.NET pages.
Nobody's perfect. That is why spell checker is your indispensable tool. The fastest way you can check a page is through a spell checker. No matter how good you are at spelling, you can always make mistakes. Go on, try it for yourself.
You can add this extension in Visual Studio by selecting Tools > Extension Manager then click on Online Gallery then search for HTML Spell Checker.

Host Tracker

How can you determine if your website goes down if the problem is with your local network or the problem is in your hosting domain? Host-Tracker.com will check how your website is going.
Host-Tracker displays where the website can be successfully pinged around the world. This is useful especially when you want to check if you have done things right or made some mistakes when building a website.

Pingdom

Pingdom helps you verify if your website is always up. Pingdom is an online tool, in order to use you need signup to their website. In that site, you can set how many times you can check how is your site doing every after several minutes.
The great thing about Pingdom is that it sends you an email, Twitter, SMS, or iPhone alert if your site goes down. This is also configurable in Pingdom's website.

Error Logging Modules and Handlers (ELMAH)

ELMAH or Error Logging Modules and Handlers are tools which enables you to record errors that are happening in your website. It works perfect with ASP.NET web forms, and MVC. You can set ELMAH to store errors and a number of different stores that includes XML files, Access database, SQL database, and Oracle database or even in your computer's RAM. Another advantage of using ELMAH is that you can set it to email error messages when errors occur.

ySlow

Want to test the front-end of your website in a browser? ySlow is an add-on for Firefox that lets you test the overall performance of your website. It does not accurately checks everything, but such a tool can ensure that your website does not encounter issues, and it stays alive at all times.
IIS SEO Toolkit
To help your site from being searchable, Microsoft has a tool for IIS called IIS Search Optimization Toolkit. It can help identify issues with your website that can hurt your pagerank. You can also use this tool to create a sitemap for your site and submit it in Google or Bing.

.NET Reflector

.NET Reflector enables you to take any assemble and disassemble it into C# or VB.NET codes. You can also use this tool to view the source code of an assembly even if you don't have the actual source code.
.NET Reflector is a great tool to find out what a code does to your website.

Ajax Minifier

Compression and minification is essential to help speeding up the site load times and also reducing the file size of JavaScript and CSS by up to 20%.

Summary

These are just some of the tools to help improve performance, improve SEO, verify your site's uptime and downtimes, or even debug your website. All these tools are free and can work with any asp.net web hostingproviders.