#2782

Development tools for coding projects

It was finally time to re-pave my machine which had been getting a bit sluggish of late. I started off with Peter’s machine repave post and created my own backlog of things I install. A while back a blogged about tools for personal coding projects which proved pretty popular. I thought I’d follow it up with another one about the some of the other tools I use both at work and for projects at home. So you could consider this “Tools for personal coding projects – part 2”

After installing the OS and drivers and running Windows Update I work off the following install backlog:

The basics

Enough to get started writing code.

Visual Studio 2008
Visual Studio SDK – DSL tools etc
PowerShell – Don’t forget to use “set-executionpolicy remotesigned” to allow load scripts to run.
Beyond Compare 

I’d also be running Resharper but isn’t not released for 2008 yet (boo!). If you don’t want to spend money on BeyondCompare then SourceGear Diffmerge is a good free tool. I lurve those SourceGear guys.

Unit testing

For an improved unit testing experience I’m using:

TestDriven.NET
XUnit.NET
NCover – Code coverage for your tests

Utilities

These are all xcopy installable so I just copy them back from my backed up data:

FileMon
Process Monitor
Process Explorer
RegMon
Notepad2
Reflector

There’s a bunch of other SysInternals tools that you might want to look at depending on your needs.

Misc

Other stuff I use regularly:

Windows Live Writer

When I’m finally done I run Windows Update again to make sure I have all the latest patches.