After a few weeks of working with Sitecore Rocks, the Visual Studio extension for developers working with the ASP.NET CMS, I found it worth adding to this series of blog posts describing Sitecore Differentiating Factors.

The more I use the Sitecore Rocks product, the more impressed I am. I don't know of any CMS product that provides this level of integration with any development IDE, and I think using Sitecore Rocks may be the easiest way to extend Visual Studio (whether the function is specific to Sitecore or not). And to think that it will always be free software...Sitecore is definitely doing everything it can to make learning and using Sitecore as easy as possible, and to maximize developer productivity. I think @therocksguy should be @therocksstar.

To avoid repeating the details that convinced me to add Sitecore Rocks to this series, you might be interested in reading one or more of my blog posts about Sitecore Rocks:

• Introducing Sitecore Rocks
• Major Components of Sitecore Rocks
• Sitecore Rocks Connections
• Attach a Sitecore Rocks Connection to a Visual Studio Project
• Sitecore Rocks Plugins and Extensions
• Sitecore Rocks Template Hierarchy Viewer
• Sitecore Rocks Pipelines
• Sitecore Rocks Extensions
• Sitecore Rocks Queries
• Sitecore Rocks Visual Studio Add Item Templates
• Sitecore Rocks Query Analyzer Ingredients for the Sitecore ASP.NET CMS 

Even after these ten posts, I feel like I haven't even had a chance to start covering everything - there is so much functionality in this software and numerous significant new features appear in every build. I highly recommend that all Sitecore developers begin using Sitecore Rocks as soon as possible.