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!