Code Smarter? How about more consistent

I've always been a mentor of some kind.  With that I'm always looking for ways to help unify how people and teams work - and I commonly look at document templates, forms, etc to help the process.  But what about code?  Sure, you could use features like Enterprise Templates to help guide the structure of your projects - but what about code?    I want to see everyone on my teams code the same way - no matter what their background is or what they are used to.  In most team environments, I usually wrestle with getting people to write nice, consistent, maintainable code according to some coding convention (which seems to change from project to project for some reason).  Face it, coders are lazy (and that includes me!!!)  and they like to do things their way because they are always smarter then anyone else.  This makes maintenance a nightmare and code reviews painful.  So, how do you achieve consistency across your development team?  You can also RAM coding conventions down people throats with little success.  You can spend endless time training people - who's got time for that anyway?  Or...you can make it easy to conform to coding standards using the tool you actually cut code in (well, not notepad...I mean VS.NET).

There are a few tools that are out there that help this.  One that really impresses me is CodeSmart 2003 for VS.NET.  One world – cool.  This tool (combined with some witty ideas of my own) could really make a difference in team development in terms of helping developers code to standards and share best practices.  What I like the most about this tool is that its compliments VS.NET perfectly….its not intrusive like other tools.  My development teams will be using this from now on – there is no mistake.

Check it out - http://www.axtools.com/

Expect a product review of this tool by me in the very near future ;-)