What is your best list of 'must have' development tools? [closed]
I recently burned up my development laptop (it literally emitted smoke from the vents). After pulling the hard disk drive I was unable to get it to spin with a USB device attached to a home tower. Since I was on a deadline I had to rush and buy a new laptop (Turion 64 x2) running Vista.
After I installed my required applications Visual Studio 2005/Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server editions client tools, Adobe CS3, and source control clients: I am wondering what list of “must haves” developer tools that are out there these days? I’m a big fan of Fiddler and LINQPad, but what I am missing?
I read the other question here and I am aware of Hanselman's list. I was not specific enough in my original question. By "these days" I meant new and latest tools (perhaps available only 64 bit), which in geek years might just be 12 days, I don't know.
Let me be general [then specific]:
- Your IDE of choice [Visual Studio 2008 here]
- Your debugger [It is usually part of your IDE, but sometimes WinDbg is needed]
- Its plugins for refactoring and source control [ReSharper 4+ and Ankh SVN 2+]
- Your OS's addons for source control [TortoiseSVN]
- A better Diff and Merge Tool to plug into the above SCM tools [WinMerge]
- A fast loading text editor for when your IDE is too much [Vim, Notepad++]
- If you're doing web development, get tools for that [Firefox 3 with Add-ons: Web Developer, Firebug, TamperData, Poster, Firecookie, FireFTP, FirePHP, Rainbow for Firebug, ReloadEvery, Selenium IDE]
- Requisite tools for working with text [GNU TextUtils, via Cygwin or gnuwin32.sf.net]
- Scripting tools [Perl, Python, Z shell, all those GNU base packages in Cygwin]
- A regular expression testing tool for when your eyes hurt [Expresso and RegexBuddy]
For Java I swap out 1 and 3 with Eclipse, and its plugins for Maven and SVN. I haven't found a refactoring plug in... you'd think I'd use IntelliJ IDEA, but I never started using it.
Notepad++ for sure
- Winamp (I love coding with music playing in the background)
- Coffee