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?

This entry is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.