After 6 years it is time for an update of my tool list. At first, I thought that there are not that many changes, but after reinstalling my laptop I noticed that there are a few new entries that I would not want to miss.
Do you know a tool that is not on this list and that you find is a must-have? Please leave a comment with a link so that I can try it.
Windows for software development
Windows Terminal (Finally!) a decent terminal for Windows that offers multiple tabs, Unicode and UTF-8 character support.
WSL2 is the Windows Subsystem for Linux and runs a Linux distribution inside Windows. That allows us to switch between Windows and Linux and access all the great Linux-tools – all within a company-approved system.
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 is great when you make a presentation and want to show a part of your desktop that can not 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.
1Remote is a modern remote session manager that replaces RDP (Microsoft Remote Desktop). Unlike RDP, 1Remote can handle sessions and changes in the screen resolution without a problem.
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 4 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 does not sound spectacular, but this code can range from comparing lists, to database queries up to a set of maintenance scripts for a production system.
Visual Studio Code is a light-weight IDE that works great for smaller Python projects. The are many useful extensions, especially if you use containers to develop your projects.
PyCharm Professional is the IDE I use for larger Python projects.
Jupyter Lab offers great support for data analytics with its sharable notebooks.
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.
Visual Studio
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 do not 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.
CodeMaintainability 2022 is a small extension that shows us the Cyclomatic complexity of our methods. It is a helpful reminder that we should keep our methods at an understandable level.
Add New File allows us with Shift + F2 to add multiple files at once. It also can add files multiple levels down a folder structure and create the missing folders in the same action.
Open Command Line allows us to open the location of a file with ALT + Space instead of the detour with the context menu.
Open in Visual Studio Code extends the context menu in the Solution Explorer with a button that opens the selected item inside VS Code. This is especially helpful if you want to work with the many plug-ins provided by VS Code and still do your C# development inside Visual Studio.
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 is not enough or a plugin is only available for Firefox.
Postman is a vital tool to query REST services. You do not need much else to test a service.
cUrl is a powerful tool to transfer data over various protocols.
HTTPie is an HTTP client you can use to explore (web) APIs and for many tasks a useful Curl replacement.
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 the place I 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 do not remember the syntax for the command line.
Oh my Posh is a great extension to show a useful Git prompt in your terminal. Especially when you develop on Windows, this extension is a must-have.
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 is great for all those tasks where Photoshop/Gimp would be too much.
Paint is old, limited, and boring – but all you need if you have to cut an image or make minimal adjustments.
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 do not 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.