My Tool List of 2018

This is my list of little tools and helpers that I install on all my devices. It was inspired by Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List and some tools may overlap. Nevertheless, there are plenty of differences and I’m sure that you will find one or more gems that simplify your developer life. If you know a tool that is missing and is a must-have, please leave a comment with a link to that tool.

 

Utilities

Greenshot is a great tool for taking screenshots. It can highlight certain areas, hide others and add dots with numbers out of the box. Most screenshots you see in my blog are made with Greenshot.

7-Zip is for me still the best zipping tool. It is fast and supports a lot of formats (*.zip, *.7z, *.rar, bzip2, gzip and *.tar). This is especially helpful when you use different operating systems where zip is not the default format everyone uses.

ZoomIt is a little tool to zoom on your desktop. It’s great when you make a presentation and want to show a part of your desktop that can’t be scaled.

LastPass a well-integrated password manager that runs in your browser or on your phone. It supports two-factor authentication and creates really long passwords.

Process Explorer from the Sysinternals tools is a great help when you need to figure out which program/process blocks a file or directory.

 

Editors and IDEs

Notepad++ is the best editor you can get for free. I use it whenever I need to convert files between character sets or need to open large files.

Sublime Text 3 is more like an IDE than a text editor. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux and is great for writing Ruby or mass edit files in a project.

LINQPad is a minimal execution environment for code. You write only the C# code for your task without the overhead of an CLI program. This doesn’t sound spectacular, but this code can range from comparing lists, to database queries up to a set of maintenance scripts for a production system.

 

Databases

SQL Server Management Studio is a great tool to query and maintain SQL Server databases.

SSMS Tools Pack extents SQL Server Management Studio with many useful features. The most important ones for me: Automatic transaction blocks, a history of all commands you executed and a great export functionality for data.

DB Browser 4 SQLite is great to look inside a SQLite database and change data. Not as powerful as SQL Server Management Studio for SQL Server, but it offers all you need.

 

Visual Studio

OzCode makes debugging code so much simpler. My 3 favourite reasons for OzCode are described here.

ReSharper Ultimate is for me the extension who turns Visual Studio from a good IDE into a great one. The Ultimate version offers these tools I don’t want to miss:

• dotTrace the profiler to see where your application spends time
• dotCover to measure test coverage
• dotMemory to profile the memory consumption
• dotPeek to decompile 3th party libraries

To make ReSharper even better, you can extend it with plugins. Those two help me a lot:

• StyleCop by JetBrains tells ReSharper how to format code to satisfy StyleCop
• Cyclomatic Complexity is great to see how complex your methods are

WakaTime is a Visual Studio extension to track the time you spend in different solutions. The weekly and monthly summary offers interesting insights on your projects. This extension is available for different IDEs and works with Sublime Text as well.

NDepend is a quality tool for .Net. It finds problems and tells you if the technical debt is growing.

 

Web and Web Development

Google Chrome is fast and offers the best developer tools. Those plugins make Chrome even better:

• EditThisCookie lets you modify your cookies
• BugMagnet makes exploratory testing a lot simpler by creating all sorts of special inputs for forms.
• AdBlock to see the contend of a web page without all the advertisement and pop-ups.

Firefox all the cases where Chrome isn’t enough or a plugin is only available for Firefox.

Postman is a vital tool to query REST services. You don’t need much else to test a service.

cUrl is a powerful tool to transfer data over various protocols.

Fiddler is a proxy server that shows you what is transferred over the network. With the build in features you can modify the data and the response. It may even help you to find security vulnerabilities.

 

Version Control

Git is my favourite version control system. It works for small throw-away experiments as well as for long running commercial projects with many contributors.

GitHub is my favourite place to host my (private) Git repositories. The user interface is simple, the pricing reasonable and the collaboration features are well thought-out.

GitHub Desktop is a very simple Git client that works with any Git repository, not only those from Git Hub. In my opinion a great tool to make your first steps with Git.

GitKraken is the heavy-use tool for all things related to Git. I use it whenever I have to do more complex tasks and don’t remember the syntax for the command line.

 

Image Viewing and Processing

Paint.Net is a small but powerful image editor that offers much more than the Paint tool shipped with Windows. It’s great for all those tasks where Photoshop/Gimp would be too much.

IrfanView is an incredible fast image viewer. Simple actions like rotation and resize can be done without the need to switch to a bigger application. A great plus is the batch rename/edit feature, where you can modify hundreds of images at once.

 

Mac

Scrivener shows its strengths with big writing projects. You don’t need to write a book, but if you do, Scrivener is great to move text around and compile it to whatever format you need.

iTerm2 a console replacement with all the features who simplify the work in the terminal: search, split panes, tabs and a paste history.