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:
Applications
- 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. Clunky graphs, but the info is still pretty useful.
- 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.
- Process Explorer: Task Manager amped to 11. Shows everything in Task Manager plus performance monitors for each process, including .NET monitors. Also colour-coded so you can see programs using the CLR at a glance. And, of course, free.
- NUnit: to see that green, baby! I still use the NUnit GUI. Made over, of course.
- NCover: code coverage; it’s the only one to use. Here’s an improved xsl file for it.
- VS 2003: duh!
- Vault: the only source control solution. Actually, no it’s not: it’s geared toward programming teams(with money), but I use it because it’s free for personal use and Eric Sink is just so damn smart about software(like Joel Spolsky without the attitude)
- 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
- Notepad2 and Notepad++: two light weight text editors that do a lot more than Notepad.
VS Plugins
- TestDriven.NET: do TDD right in Visual Studio; and attach a debugger to the unit test case that is giving you some trouble. Free, but you must fill out a survey.
- 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; I’m continually finding new things that Resharper does. (The rest on this list are all free; well, VS isn’t but I got it for free.)
- Copy As HTML: converts code to html for posting to blogs. Performs syntax highlighting and line numbers.
- GhostDoc: winner of Roy O’s add-in contest; takes the tedium out of adding comments to code. Still a little rough around the edges, but lots of potential here.
Got any others that are indispensible?
Great list. I wish I’d found that earlier. I know most of those you listed already. I just love all these tools…