A Few Very Useful Tools

del.icio.us Tags: Windows Development,Utilities

In my toolbox of nifty utilities that I use for my job, there’s a few that I think I couldn’t live without.

• Sysinternals Suite- Now owned by Microsoft, this toolset developed by Mark Russinovich is hugely useful for anyone building applications for Windows or supporting Windows PCs. Particularly, ProcessExplorer and DebugView are go-to tools for me. ProcessExplorer is what TaskManager should be while DebugView will let you see trace statements emitted by applications.
• TextPad – Ok, there’s a million text editors out there, and this is just one. But seriously, you’re not just getting by with Notepad are you? TextPad allows syntax highlighting and also support regular expression based find/replace which has made a lot of tedious, rote, work really simple on occasion.
• NDepend – A great tool (alas, not free/shareware) that will help you in many ways to hunt down how your code is being used. CQL (Code Query Language) rocks the house! Want to know all the methods used directly or indirectly by Class A that are directly or indirectly using Class B so you know how big a job is going to be to replace some ugly bits (we all have them, you know that!), this will do it for you! A must on large projects in my book.

Many other nifty tools can be found on Scott Hanselman’s Blog here…