Developers that have been “doing it” for a while can all remember the day when their job turned from coding in their favorite language and environment to something more complicated. Wether it was a need to debug an application or website already running, a need to reverse engineer something or just a time create a set of graphics. During these moments tools and often 3rd party tools not native to their environment came in to save the day. The list below is just some of the tools I have personally used at just such moments and I hope you find it useful.

Also stay tuned for a presentation I will be doing on this very subject (@VSLive) as I will be sure to post my slides and presentation notes here after I present.

Tools List

Debugging

  • Fiddler2 – HTTP(s) traffic inspector
  • IE Developer toolbar– Web page analyzer within Internet Explorer (IE6 or IE7)
  • FileMon – This free SysInternals tool allows you to monitor all I/O access on your Windows machine
  • TCPView – This free SysInternals tool allows you to monitor TCP traffic on any Windows machine
  • RegMon– This free SysInternals tool allows you to monitor all access to the Windows registery
  • Process Monitor– This free SysInternals tool allows you to get details about any running Windows process
  • Reflector– Reverse engineering tool for .NET assemblies (now by Redgate)

Visual Studio Add-ins

Graphics

  • Paint.NET – A free and powerful image editing software. While its no Photoshop (the standard for such tools) it is a lot more power then most average developers will know what to do it.
  • Adobe Color Tool – This tool known as Kuler is an excellent way to find related and “proper” colors for creating graphics

Presentation

  • ZoomIT – This free SysInternals tool allows you to zoom to any part of the screen, make annotations and even save a screenshot of the area. A must-have for presenters

Miscellaneous

  • Live Writer – If you are a blogger or are looking to start blogging then this is the tool for you. A “Word like” experience for blogging that is totally free, once you use this tool you’ll never go back to a web based blog post editor

Missing Tool Categories

If you look at the list above carefully you will notice various categories missing such as:

  • SQL Tools
  • Refactoring Tools
  • Unit Testing Tools

This is a valid claim but understand that in my mind those tools can fill up a blog post of their own and I will speak about them at a later time.

Related Links

There are other great resources for tools and add-ins. Here are some of my suggestions for such lists:

As always please please reply back to this thread with any of your suggestions as I always look to expand my own tools briefcase.