2006 Products Of The Year

APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT TOOL
Compuware DevPartner 8.0

For VARs, an application development job can prove either a cash cow or a lost cause. The magic needed to profit from those chores comes from a combination of talent and tools. While talent may be hard to come by, tools aren't. The trick is to use a tool that speeds development and offers robust features.

Slide Show: Top 10 Products Of The Year

For those developers working with .Net, few tools can compare with Compuware DevPartner 8.0, which reduces the complexity of .Net development without eliminating any features. This garners DevPartner 8.0 the Product of the Year nod for application development tools.

When it comes to debugging .Net enterprise code, DevPartner 8.0 easily surpasses the tools in Microsoft Visual Studio. The product excels when it comes to simple runtime debugging, where it has the ability to trace .Net's memory, making it an ideal tool for testing .Net applications.

DevPartner fully integrates with Visual Studio 2005. To review code, it uses a database of more than 600 rules of industry best practices Compuware has accumulated for .Net applications. The static code analysis is extremely simple. After parsing .Net code, DevPartner compares it with all known problems in its database and returns a list of rules that were broken in the code.

Each rule provides an explanation section, a source line, information about what triggered the error, a repair section and a notes section. The repair section shows that sample code can be written in C#, Visual Basic.Net or C++.

In addition to scanning code, developers can automatically analyze object and variable declarations to make sure code follows company-accepted naming conventions.

DevPartner arrives with two tools, Performance Analysis and Performance Expert, both of which help developers optimize code.

Compuware provides partners with channel-neutral sales teams to help them through a sales cycle. Via a dedicated and secured portal, partners can receive product demos, proofs-of concept and evaluation software, including seminars and Webcasts.

It also offers a reseller revenue-sharing program for those partners not able to provide a complete solution. Because DevPartner is a complex product, partners that purchased priority-one technical support receive immediate help. Compuware declined to disclose margin information.

-- Mario Morejon