Tools I Use –or– Shameless Plug Day
Sure, every developer uses his/her compiler, editor, debugger, IDE, etc. but does it stop there? Heck no.
Here are the set of tools I use in addition, in no particular order:
- Visual Studio 2008 with the following additions
- TestDriven.Net – lets me run my NUnit unit tests in the IDE
- Home Grown comment macro:
Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports EnvDTE90
Imports System.Diagnostics
Public Module Module1
Private Function GetUserName() As String
GetUserName = System.Environment.UserName
End Function
Sub InjectChangeComment()
ActiveDocument().Selection().Text = "// " + System.DateTime.Now.ToString("MM-dd-yy") + " " + GetUserName() + vbTab + vbTab + vbTab
End Sub
End Module
- AQTime – I use this for performance measurement and finding leaks.
- Araxis Merge – this lets me merge changes – the folder merge is a huge time saver when I get a new drop of a library.
- Adobe Acrobat – Still the best tool for document interchange for anything that needs specific formatting.
- Adobe Photoshop – I use PhotoShop for doing mockups, getting a second read on “unusual” files, etc.
- AsTiffTagViewer – I use this for disassembling TIFFs. I should really write my own using dotImage’s TIFF Tag routines, but AsTiffTagViewer works so well already…
- .NET Reflector – I used to use ILDasm, but Reflector has been terrific for looking at code I’ve written to see what the compiler generated.
- Pidgin – my current IM client. It appears to suck the least. Remember, communication is as important as writing code.
- FxCop – Microsoft’s static analysis tool for .NET.
- NUnit – I use TestDriven.Net far more often, but there are times when NUnit is a better choice.