I had quite an embarrassing moment when Scott Hanselman who is reviewing TypeMock.NET sent me his first impressions.
The e-mails where screen-shots of spelling typo’s in TypeMock’s API’s documentation. It turns out that there are quite a few spelling mistakes in the API’s documentation. 😳
Well, we added a task to fix all these, but as we are software developers we looked for a tool that would do the job for us.
Not Much has changed since 2005, and ZMan’s blog has a good summary of the existing tools. We tried the $50 Keyoti StudioSpell and the $29 MailFrame’s CodeSpell. I am not going to do a complete review but CodeSpell found mistakes in comments and in method/variable naming in an integrated way (without popping up other dialogs) and apart from crashing the Visual Studio when parsing non Latin text, it runs in the background and marks mistakes in the editor as you type, this will keep our spelling correct as we develop (very agile). The StudioSpell did not find all the mistake and didn’t work in a very integrated way (you must initiate the speller rather then have the speller mark mistakes with a wave).
To check end user messages StudioSpell is probably better, but for comments and method names, CodeSpell is way better, and for $29 it is a no brainer. Thanks Will Ballard 🙂