Christopher Bennage

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Your Development Tools

Every now and then I like to get a pulse on what people are using for their development environment.  I'm continually picking after useful tools from reading other developer's posts.  I'd like to know what your primary tools are, your list of favorites that you might not use every day, and what type of development work you tend to do.

For the most part, I'm a Web developer.  Though, I'm spending a lot of time with WPF (expect some posts shortly) and I'd like to take my business in that direction.

Daily Tools

  • Visual Studio 2005

  • SQL Server Management Studio

  • ReSharper, If you don't know about ReSharper, go download it now.

  • GhostDoc, perfect for the lazy developer who needs to generate documentation

  • Subversion, I will never use VSS again

  • TortoiseSVN, my preferred client for Subversion (at the moment)

  • EditPlus, because sometimes I just don't want to launch VS

  • TopStyle, excellent CSS editor

  • BaseCamp, this is a very recent edition

  • NUnit, and ReSharper provides an interface for running your tests in VS!

Not Quite Daily:

  • Lutz Roeder's Reflector, you can learn a lot for dissecting the .NET framework

  • Roy Osherove's Regulator, invaluable for experimenting with Regular Expressions

  • SQL Prompt, This adds database-specific Intellisense in your SQL editor!

  • Dreamweaver, Hmmm, why do I feel like I need to defend this?

  • Fireworks, I was really into Macromedia several years back. This is what I use for creating art assets when I need them.

Things I Used to Use

Base on my list from April of 2004.

  • CodeSmith, not that it is bad, I just don't do much code generation lately

  • SourceGear Vault, I ended up migrating to Subversion

  • Altova XMLSpy, well, er, I'm just using EditPlus (or VS's built in XML editor)

  • NAnt, after VS2005 I'm using msbuild.  Honestly, it's kind of hard to tell the difference

  • NDoc, :-(  I'm keeping an eye on Sandcastle

  • TargetProcess, still a cool tool

 Tools I'm Keeping An Eye On:

 Things I Hope To Use Daily:

 James Avery wrote about ten essential VS add-ins in MSDN Magazine.  Let's have your lists!

Posted 10-18-2006 2:14 PM by Christopher Bennage

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Comments

Joe wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-18-2006 10:57 PM
Christopher Bennage wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-19-2006 1:56 AM

I should have added that I use a custom O\RM that I codeveloped with Rob Eisenberg.  However, my fascination with Castle has roused an interest in NHibernate.

tobias wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-19-2006 4:12 AM

And as a free alternative to VisualSVN: AnkhSVN  ( http://ankhsvn.tigris.org/ ) - Works pretty well for me.

Derik Whittaker wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-19-2006 7:35 AM

Great list, but you forgot a few

Ants Profiler (http://red-gate.com/products/ants_profiler/index.htm) - Great for finding performance/memory issues.

Mozilla - Gotta have a good web browser.

WinMerge - Great free visual diff tool.

Christopher Bennage wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-19-2006 1:04 PM

Thanks Derik, I recently made the switch to FireFox as my default browser.  I clung to IE for a long time.

I use the diff tool that's packed with TortoiseSVN, TortoiseMerge (they recently added an image diffing tool also).

P. wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-19-2006 1:19 PM
Ryan Smith wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-19-2006 2:49 PM

Good list of tools.  We're still using CVS at work, but I'm in the process of migrating all our source to SVN.

I still use VI from time to time for regular expressions.  I know the syntax well, and it works extremely well.

I can't believe that no one has mentioned Adobe Photoshop either - definitly a tool that's always open.

One thing every web developer MUST HAVE is FireBug (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1843/).  I can't even imagine how I developed for the web without it.  It has made such a huge difference in my live that I would probably curl up and die without it.

Sergio Pereira wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-19-2006 7:34 PM

also VS, N*.*, EditPlus, and SVN

I grew dependent on the following (google for the links, please, not everything is strictly a development tool but they are all very useful to me)

slickrun

console (tabbed command windows)

iehttpheaders + ie-dev-toobar + ieDocMon (not so much fiddler)

firefox + a few developer extensions

ruby (for quick scripting)

truecrypt (to transport source code securely on a usb drive)

hamachi (similar reason)

realVnc (goes well with hamachi on suspicious wlans)

filezilla

flexwiki

kdiff

cruisecontrol.net

prototype.js (I'm biased here)

timesnapper (+ truecrypt just to be sure ;)

David Brabant wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-20-2006 4:47 AM

Daily tools:

Visual Studio 2005 TeamDev edition

SQL Server 2005

ClearCase

PowerGrep and RegEx Buddy ( http://www.powergrep.com )

FinalBuilder ( http://www.finalbuilder.com )

Very often:

Araxis Merge ( http://www.araxis.com )

NotePad++ ( http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net )

XML Spy  (http://www.altova.com )

VMWare and/or Virtual PC

FxCop

... and zillions of small utilities (from sysinternals, for example) collected over the years.

Christopher Bennage wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-20-2006 3:19 PM

Rick Strahl has mentioned SlickRun more than once. He's a big fan.  Check out his post regarding a minor conflict between SlickRun and Visual Studio: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/3646.aspx

Brian wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-24-2006 5:36 PM

Christopher,

Can we get you to check out BugSentry?  Add the BugSentry dll and it automatically reports problems from deployed applications.  Naturally, we think it is awesome.

www.bugsentry.com

Corneliu I. Tusnea wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 10-25-2006 9:36 AM

Hawkeye anyone?

http://www.acorns.com.au/hawkeye/

Everytime you just want to "change something" in an application that is already running. From a simple "Enable" of a button to method & events invocations.

JavierRomero wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 11-07-2006 10:18 AM

Amazing list... great reference article... thanks

Damien Guard wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 11-09-2006 7:33 AM

TortoiseSVN is okay but I prefer to have mine integrated with VisualStudio.

Check out AnkhSVN - the latest RC4 is quite stable and of course, free.

[)amien

Christopher Bennage wrote re: Your Development Tools
on 11-09-2006 4:13 PM
My development tools at DamienG wrote My development tools at DamienG
on 08-23-2007 3:46 AM

Pingback from  My development tools at  DamienG

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