I try to maintain a toolkit of useful apps for doing my daily development tasks. Some of these I use very frequently, others not so much but they are useful to know about. I thought I'd catalogue them on my blog so that I remember them when I'm setting up a new machine :)
Tool Name Description
Microsoft Visual Studio I think this one goes without saying, but if anyone getting into development needs to choose an IDE I'd highly recommend starting here! It pretty much does everything you need (solutions, projects, code editing, compiling, debugging, NuGet package management, profiling, source control and more) and at the time of writing is available for Windows and Mac. There are free editions of Visual Studio suitable for most people.
Recommended plugins:
JetBrains Rider If you like Visual Studio + Re-Sharper and have the dotUltimate JetBrains license I'd invite you to try the JetBrains IDE Rider. I tried this out as it's fully cross platform and I liked the idea of being able to seamlessly switch OS without any noticeable difference in my IDE experience and I have to say I think I now prefer it to using Visual Studio!
Notepad++ A free text editor which is well maintained and comes with a lot of features for working with text files. It's not a "code editor", as such although it supports syntax highlighting, but it's useful for quickly viewing or editing all kinds of text files.
VS Code A free cross platform and very extensible IDE/text editor by Microsoft. For me, this is the middle ground between opening Notepad++ and opening a full blown IDE such as Visual Studio or Rider.
Sourcetree A free GUI for Git. One of the best I've tried and adds real value vs using the Visual Studio plugin or going fully command line. Linux alternative: Git-Cola
Docker Installing Docker desktop opens up a whole world of containerised apps ready for you to integrate with in your code, such as Redis caches, Kafka instances, SQL server, FTP servers - pretty much run anything with a simple command!
Fiddler A free tool to aid debugging web based application. It can capture web traffic as well as reply packets, intercept calls and more.
Wireshark A free tool to aid debugging network traffic. Generally I use this when Fiddler can't intercept the traffic and I need something a little further down the network stack for capturing traffic.
dotPeek A free tool for decompiling .NET assembles by JetBrains. Can be used standalone or if you use Rider/Re-Sharper you can have the code auto-disassemble if you F12 into a compiled reference.
Rambox Desktop app for managing all the various web based tools that you use. This one is more useful if you're a consultant with more than one client, as using Rambox you can organize all of your apps/sites into "workspaces" each with it's own set of stored credentials.
mRemoteNG A free tool for managing connections to remote machines including RDP, SSH and Web interfaces. Linux alternative: Remmina
WinMerge A free tool for comparing and merging files and folders. Linux alternative: Meld
Conduktor A free GUI for inspecting the data in a Kafka instance
Microsoft PowerToys Several useful extensions for Windows to increase productivity Linux alternatives: Ulauncher - like PowerToys Run