Must Have Software and Tools

2008 July edition.

FireFox 3 – Extensions have made this my main browser

FireBug – The best toolkit for any web developer out there.

Web Developer Toolkit – I uses this less and less with Firebug getting the job done 90% of the time.

Better Gmail – Makes gmail go over a SSL connection and also replaces attachment images with a nice icon representation. ColorZilla – A great tool to quickly find the HEX value of anything on any web page.

Visual Studio 2008 – Visual Studio is still the standard for IDE’s.  Of course it could always be faster but it is really nice.

Resharper – Love rescharper, cleans my code as I type.

iTunes – I use iTunes to manage my podcast listening list.  It does a great job at that.

Microsoft SQL Server – Most .NET projects connect to this so it’s a good idea to have a local copy running

Management Studio – At first I wasn’t a Management Studio fan, give me back the 2000 version of Enterprise Manager and Query Editer.  Nevermind.  Management Studio is double sweet for the price of one.

Office 2007 – The biggest upgrade in Microsoft’s office line in some time.  The ribbon bar is nice and I love how they brought really useful features to the forefront.

mRemote – Where would I be with out this terminal services manager.

Notepad++ – My texteditior and most of the time PHP ide of choice.  Fast, simple, customizable, a few nice plugins. 

Witty Twitter Client – Definitely the best looking Twitter client.  Witty is WPF and WPF done nice.

Windows Live Writer – Who knew Microsoft could put out a nice Web 2.0 , errrr, Windows client.  Writing this post in Live writer as we speak…

Fireworks – I guess the new photoshop has most of these features, so that will work too.

Blackberry Manager – For upgrading your firmware on your crackberry and other crackberry tasks.

WinSCP – A free opensource SFTP manager for when you have to work on the nix machines.

FileZilla – Free, open source, clean, simple FTP client.

SlickEdit – A nicer version of notepad++

Navicat – My preferred mysql manager of choice, although their query interface needs improvement.

7Zip – Can handle tar, zip, gz, and other compressed formats, free too.

CodeIgniter – Loving this PHP MVC framework.  Simpler then cakePHP. I’m building a little something, something in this, more to come on that front.

CCleaner – Free PC crap cleaner.

IE Tester – A must for web developers.  Test against IE 5 and up all on the same machine.

Surround SCM – Of course my version control software of choice.   Cross platform, really nice GUI, intuitive interface.  Plus integrates on almost all IDEs.

TestTrack Pro – Our bug tracking software.  Great workflow engine.

QA Wizard Pro – Automated testing tool.

Foxit – PDF reader software.  Runs so much smaller then Adobe.

FreeRam XP Pro – RAM manager

Process Explorer – Free microsoft add on, this should replace task manager.

SlickRun – Launcher program

Written by Tim on July 29th, 2008 with 12 comments.
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