My development tools

Christopher Bennage wrote about his development tool set-up and encouraged others to do the same so here's my current set-up.

Visual Studio 2005 - IDE of preference despite it's sluggish behaviour
SQL Server 2005 Management Studio - Took getting used to but it's an improvement on 2000's Enterprise Manager
AnkhSVN - Subversion support inside Visual Studio 2005
.NET Reflector - Searching .NET API or to find out what it's doing
Web Application Projects - Stop using VS's web sites and start using web applications!
Web Deployment Projects - Deploy to dev, test or live servers as easily as building a project

CodeSmith - Need to get to grips with v4 to build our whole database layer in one hit
Trac - Bug tracking, milestones & wiki with integrated support for Subversion
TortoiseSVN - Check-in/out of non-project items (e.g. art assets)
Web Developer Extension - Trying CSS changes on-the-fly, validating pages etc. from Firefox
Firebug - Examining pages, the page DOM etc. from Firefox
KDiff - Excellent 3-way diff tool that works great with AnkhSVN
Subtext - Blogging system running here

Visual C# Express and XNA - Messing with 3D graphics, controllers and pixel shaders
Ogre - Steve's object-oriented 3D engine
XCode and Cocoa - Still quite alien with it's message-based calling mechanism but obviously powerful

Eclipse - IDE for developing Java (C++ and C# support in various stages too)
Ruby on Rails - Interesting RAD approach to web development - Apple also supporting on Mac OS X 10.5
Sandcastle - Microsoft's documentation tool that already seems to have had an impact on NDoc
SubSonic - Build-provider that generates an ORM on the fly and provides automatic developer-only db editing pages

Delphi 5/6 - Borland's great RAD tool for non-.NET development, later versions support .NET too
JBuilder - Java development although I'd probably move to Eclipse
Visual Studio 2003 - Still required for the odd .NET 1.1 application/testing

[)amien

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1 Gabriel Lozano-Morán Nov 10th, 2006 at 18:11

You don't use ReSharper?
2 Damien Guard Nov 12th, 2006 at 22:11

I tried Resharper when using VS2003 and although I liked the Refactoring I didn't like what it did to my keyboard bindings or syntax highcolour colours.

When VS2005 came along and features a bunch of refactorings I didn't feel the need to try it again.

Tell me a few benefits and maybe I'll try it again ;-)

[)amien
3 Marc Brooks Dec 12th, 2006 at 00:12

Two I think you might like:

Visual Assist X

Beyond Compare
4 Simone Busoli Apr 8th, 2007 at 20:04

Unit testing, code coverage, continuous integration, mocking...?

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