Insipired by Scott Hanselman’s blog post on the subject, I’ve decided to compile a lit of the tools I’ve added to my new developer machine. Most of these are producivity enhancements, but some are just for fun.
These are just the Windows apps. I use a MacBook at home, but haven’t got around to compiling a list of utilities I use there. Maybe some day…
Productivity tools
- Paint.Net - .Net based image manipulation package.
- 7-Zip – Archive management utility
- NotePad 2 – Fully featured text editor, with (some) syntax highlighting.
- Windows Grep – I do a lot of work with text files, and missed the Unix Grep command. Here’s an alternative for Windows.
- Tail for Windows - Another unix utility port for Windows.
- CodeRush & Refactor! - Arguably, this should have been top of my list, but since they are paid-for software I’ll leave them languishing down here. They get used every time I’m in Visual Studio, though.
- Snippet Compiler - Great for very small proof-of-concept testing.
- Lutz Roeder’s .Net Reflector – Not going to link to this since it is now full of advertising and other nastiness. The original is out there – check through Google.
Fun Stuff
- http://google.com/chrome- very nice web browser
- Twhirl – Twitter client.
- GMail Notifier – Taskbar notification of new GMail items.
I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed, but I’ll add them when I remember about them.