| Tool | Description |
| Windows Live | I switched over some time ago. This is a great tool for blog posts. I also love the code snippet plug-in.
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| CopySourceAsHtml | Handy plug-in for VS2005/VS2008 that allows you to copy code directly to HTML. This is great for sending code snippets via e-mails and keeping color, formatting, line-numbers, etc.
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| Command Prompt Here | There are tools that do this, but the truth is you really don’t need to download anything for this. Basically you can add a right-click menu item to windows explorer that will let you launch a command prompt in whatever folder you’ve highlighted. It’s not rocket science but it is handy.
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| Reflector | If you saw this and thought either “I have never heard of that” OR "Why does everyone always mention this one?” go download it right now.
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| FireBug/Windows Dev Toolbar | I know some are crazy into one of these two. I tend to have both installed since some things are easier to do in one over the other. You can do things like substitute POST/GET values to a server using FireBug but I tend to use BurpSuite or Fiddler2 for that.
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| HttpFox/WireShark | If you’re a web developer, at some point you’re going to need to look at the HTTP traffic. I used to use HTTPWatch for IE – which I actually like a bit better than HttpFox…but you also have to pay for it. SO…here I am with HttpFox for my lightweight traffic-snooping. If things get serious I use WireShark which gives you a much more robust set of functionality (such as right-clicking to view a communications stream between a single requestor/responder rather than sift through everything). It also does custom color coding and provides a quick, code-like interface for doing filtering. For example, rather than clicking through a whole bunch of, well, crap, I can type this into a filter-box: ip.src >= 192.168.4.100 && ip.src <= 192.168.4.110 to look at specific range of source IPs. |
| FooBar | I used to use WinAmp for listening to music. Foobar is much more lightweight, though, and WAY more customizable. It also has a bunch of plug-ins and APIs if you get bored.
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| Diigo [Social Bookmarking] | Let me begin this by saying I have no stake in, or association with the creators of Diigo…
That said, This is by far my most useful tool for information searching. I try to do at least one hour of research a day on the web about development…sometimes much more. So I tend to come across a lot of information that is either immediately valuable or will likely be valuable to me in the future. So, not surprisingly, I bookmark it to a social bookmarking service. The kicker here is the Diigo will save my bookmarks even if the page goes offline in its local repository. The second kicker is that I can keyword search all the content in my bookmarks to find anything I’ve bookmarked. Lastly, I can highlight lines within a page that are of particular interest to me – and even send those to others or post them to the blog. Seriously, it’s great. |
| Additions [6/2/2009] | …I decided to keep this list updated |
| Notepad++ | It’s always handy to have a lightweight text-editor around. This one happens to do syntax highlighting for a bunch of languages out of the box. It also does user defined syntax highlighting. |
| Google Calendar Sync [Info] | If you don’t happen to have a smart-phone/blackberry, you can use this free tool to keep your Outlook calendar synched with your Google calendar. Then you can easily set up SMS alerts and get a reminder for that 3:30 meeting on your mobile – just like you would if you had a blackberry. |
| GIMP | Bottom-line, Photoshop is expensive and this works just as well for my purposes. |
| SourceMonitor | This [free] tool is handy for doing quick code analysis. It will tell you the number of lines, method complexity (per the definition in Code Complete) and a few other stats. |
| WinMerge | Tool for doing side-by-side comparisons of files. It also gives you a great “zoomed-out" |
| Update [6/4/2009] | For FireFox, development associated add-ins, go to this post. |