My 2006 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.

Daily tools

• Visual Studio 2005: IDE of preference despite it’s sluggish behavior
• 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

Not quite daily

• 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

On occasion

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

Keeping an eye on

• Eclipse: IDE for developing Java (C++ and C# support in various stages too)
• Ruby on Rails: Interesting RAD approach to web development, with 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

Not used lately, still installed

• 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