Tools every C# developer should know about

Greg Young · 2006-01-26

Here are the items I must have, they are the things I install whenever I get a new machine

  1. A persistence layer i.e. Gentle.Net http://sourceforge.net/projects/gopf nHibernate http://www.nhibernate.org/

  2. A Prevalence layer Bamboo http://bbooprevalence.sourceforge.net/ PrevLayer http://www.prevayler.org/

  3. Unit testing framework nUnit http://www.nunit.org/

  4. Build tool Nant http://nant.sourceforge.net/

  5. A tool with XML documentation integration nDoc (sparx also provides one for models) http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndoc/

  6. Continuous Integration http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/

  7. UML Modelling with round tripping to/from source http://sparxsystems.com.au/

  8. CVS or SourceSafe (I prefer CVS)

  9. IE dev toolbar http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&DisplayLang=en

  10. Mono http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

  11. SharpDevelop http://www.sharpdevelop.com/OpenSource/SD/

  12. VS integration for nUnit http://www.testdriven.net/

  13. GTK# http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net/

  14. A good XML editor (the fact that this has DTD->XSD conversions is quite useful) http://www.stylusstudio.com/xml_download.html

  15. A dynamic proxy generator I use my own but castle project has a good one http://castle.sourceforge.net/

  16. A template based code generation utility MyGeneration http://www.mygenerationsoftware.com/

  17. Reflector for .NET http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/

  18. *added* resharper http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/  or another refactorring tool.

  19. *added* nCover

  20. *added* fxCop

Thats all, there are numerous other things I install but they are very specific to the projects I work on. What do YOU think should be on this list?

Greg