Friday, June 02, 2006

Favorite Developer-Oriented Utilities?

UPDATE: I completely forgot to mention a critical factor: These tools need to be freeware or open source (FOSS).  There are a ton of great utilities around which you can drop money on, but we’re focusing on FOSS toys.

One of the parts in the book James and I are writing covers miscellaneous Windows Utilities.  This chapter covers miscellaneous utilities developers find handy, but don’t fit easily in other categories like Troubleshooting, Build, Editing, etc.  We’re already writing about a good list so far: Cygwin (more than a utility, but a good fit), Cropper, SlickRun, TaskSwitchXP, ZoomIt, VMWare and Magnifixer. 

However, we’re always interested in more cool tools to write on.

Do you have any other developer-oriented utilities you think are the bee’s knees?

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Let me introduce you the following gadgets I can not develop hapilly without:

- Open Command Window Here XP PowerToy: so convenient for opening a console at an accurate location,

- Allway Sync: mirroring is a nice complement to backuping and CVSing,

- Paros Proxy: so convenient for building HTTP requests and monitoring network,

- Core FTP Lite: yep, FTP happens!

Hope this helps ;-)
David

Jim Holmes said...

Great suggestions, David! We're covering the Open Command Window here already, but I didn't have any of the others. Thanks!

Jason Follas said...

Notepad2, ZoomIn, Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar, Fiddler, FinePrint (Eval version), Image Resizer XP Powertoy, Virtual Server (now that it's free)

Anonymous said...

Desktop Sidebar, Paint.NET, TeamSpeak and/or Skype, SysInternals stuff: Process Explorer, FileMon, RegMon, Poderosa, FoxItReader.

Good luck with the book!

--Another frazzled developer dad

Unknown said...

Mmmh, I forgot 7zip because there is much more than .zip to archives!

Anonymous said...

My list is here:
http://little.xmtp.net/blog/software-i-cant-live-without/

NDoc, NUnit, ILMerge, GhostDoc, MSBee, FxCop, TestDriven.NET, Firefox with Web Developer extension, Ethereal, WinMerge, Tortoise SVN, UltraVNC.

Jim Holmes said...

Jason, Luke, and Jay: Thanks very much for your comments! We're already covering a number of these tools, but there are some great additions to the list.

Thanks for the pointers!

Jason Follas said...

Just found out about PureText:

http://stevemiller.net/puretext/

A clipboard helper app that uses a definable hotkey to paste any rich text in your clipboard as plain text. (Same as Paste Special->Text)

Jim Holmes said...

That's a great find, Jason!

Subscribe (RSS)

The Leadership Journey