The Ultimate Tools List

Mr Scott Hanselman has compiled his list of Ultimate Developer and Power User Tools which contains links to lots of great programs and other resources. Many of which have been a great help to me, so a big thank you for these pointers.

I'd like to draw attention to the apps that I find particularly valuable, and also list some others. I've chosen to list them here on my blog, because Scott may not agree with my choices.

Stuff from Scott's list:

• NUnit: The unit testing tool for .Net has catapulted me into Test Driven Development and seriously boosted my productivity. Thanks also to Gary for pointing it out!
• Notepad2: An excellent upgrade to Notepad with loads of pro-features including syntax highlighting and search/replace using regular expressions.
• WinDirStat: Visualise where all your disk space is being used up. This app is ideal when you need to Spring clean you hard disk.

Super high quality open-source apps and libraries:

• FxCop: This utility examines compiled .Net assemblies and parses the IL and reports conformance against .Net best practices. Just 10 minutes using this application taught me stacks of stuff I could do to improve my code. Definately great for training!!
• InnoSetup: A super quality installation maker for creating setup.exe software installations.
• MySQL: A highly effective open source database server ideal for cost conscious startups. There is a 100% managed .Net Connector library so you can use it in your .Net projects.
• SharpZipLib: An open source .Net implementation of the Zip compression algorithm (and others). Great for adding compression and decompression to your projects.

Essential extensions for Mozilla's Firefox:

• View Cookies: Inspect the cookies being sent to your web applications - ideal for web developers or people paranoid about spyware.
• Html Validator: This extension gives you errors and warnings for the HTML pages you are looking at. I use this to perfect my HTML skills and learn about how to get it right.