[Update: forgot a link to the excellent NUnit Gui Make Over. I figured to make up for it, I’ll link to it twice.]
I recently got an upgrade to a much faster machine at work. Doing so made me consider all the apps that I use daily for development. So here they are in no particular order:
- RSSBandit: for the first two hours at work when I’m supposed to be working. Seriously, the best aggregator for the best price.
- CLR Profiler: for profiling allocations in applications that run on the CLR.
- Ethereal: network analysis tool that knows every network protocol known to man; very useful and very free.
- TcpView: check out what ports are in use at a glance
- TestDriven.NET: do TDD right in Visual Studio; and attach a debugger to the unit test case that is giving you some trouble
- NUnit: to see that green, baby! I still use the NUnit GUI. Made over, of course.
- VS 2003: duh!
- FxCop: are you designing your libraries with the MS .NET design guidelines? You should be, and this will help you.
- Regulator: excellent regular expression tool. Let’s you doodle.
- Reflector: find out how MS did their thing with the Framework.
- Codesmith: generate strongly-typed collections, data objects, or anything else with this template-based coding generator
- Resharper: the only good refactoring tool for .NET. It’s not perfect but it’s the best out there. The only developer tool that I’ve been willing to shell out money for. (The rest on the list are all free; well VS isn’t but I got it for free.)
- Notepad2 and Notepad++: two light weight text editors that do a lot more than Notepad.
Got any others that are indispensible?
"RSSBandit: for the first two hours at work when I’m supposed to be working. Seriously, the best aggregator for the best price."
Ha ha ha… don’t tell anyone, but I totally feel you on this one. I’m an addict (which explains why I’m on the team) 😉
Funny how I have every one of the apps you mentioned except for the Notepad2 and Notepad++. I’ll have to check em out.
You should give a try to Notepad++ : The capacity to open the nfo file and the user language define system are 2 my favourite features. The Notepad2 is not necessary – if you try first Notepad++ 🙂
UltraEdit… irreplaceable text editor. Regular expression searching, column mode, syntax high-lighting, replace-in-files, etc. Soooo many features to make life infinitely easier.
Reflector Disassembler add-in… to write out entire assemblies to source code rather than one function at a time. Magic.
Desktop sidebar… to save having to run separate apps for performance monitors, news feeds, stock quotes, upcoming appointments, etc.
For me :
* Firefox – for the Internet browser.
* Filezillz – for the client FTP.
* VirtualDub – for the editing of video.
* Gaim – for the messanger.
* Notepad++ – for the source coding and Notepad replacement.
All of them are the open source (and free)!