Tools I need to do my job: Link Shell Extension

Heard of Hardlinks , Junctions , Volume Mountpoints? Powerful as they are, here's a helper to create and mange those: Link Shell Extension

Rating: Very useful!

Tools I need to do my job: PureText

PureText from Steve Miller is a little helper I use almost every day. It does simply one thing: If you have formatted text in the clipboard it will remove the formatting to pure text.

Rating: Hard to live without!

Tools I need to do my job: Console2

Console2 is a little nice helper that can host multiple command shells as tabs getting rid of many shell windows in the task bar.

Rating: Useful!

Tools I need to do my job: Debugging Tools for Windows

It is no secret that I'm a big fan of WinDbg. I try to use the Visual Studio Debugger if possible but when it comes to hard core debugging, there is no way around this tool.

Rating: Cannot do without!

Tools I need to do my job: AQTime

Profiling is important when it comes to the CCD rule "Don't optimize" which means you should not optimize code without proving that it really represents a bottle neck. I do not have very dedicated opinion on Profilers, but I can say so much that I personally found the profiler that comes with Visual Studio 2008 not very convincing. The best one I personally worked with is AQTime.

Rating: Strongly recommended.

Tools I need to do my job: XML Spy

When you are a power user of xml family techniques I really recommend using XML Spy from Altova. I've been trying lots of xml editing tools but none of them convinced me that much.

Rating: (Very) hard to do without!

Tools I need to do my job: UltraEdit

Does your Visual Studio starts quickly by clicking onto a source code file? Mine does not! So there is the need for an independent light footprint text editor that does a bit more that notepad. I tried some editors but none of them convinced me from moving away from from UltraEdit.

Rating: Hard to do without!

Tools I need to do my job: ManicTime

A new tool I just recently added to my toolbox is ManicTime. I was searching for something like a stop watch application where I could measure the time I'm spending for a specific task in order to get a better planning basis for SCRUM sprint planning. What I found with this tool is a time tagging application. It automatically detects idle times and lists on a time line which applications you are using. So you can easily rebuild time for tasks retrospectively because most of the time you will forget to switch stop watches in the common time keeping approach.

Rating: Really helpful for time keeping

Tools I need to do my job: VMWare

No need to stress the importance of Virtualization. There are several solutions outsite. I feel VMWare is most professional and I use the workstation in software development for system integration testing and various other tasks. (At home I'm running XP on VirtualBox in a Ubuntu Linux host and it does the job also pretty well.)

Tools I need to do my job: Visual Studio and Friends

Actually I don't know many other IDEs besides Visual Studio (have worked with Borland, VB6, Eclipse and MonoDevelop - a bit ). Visual Studio (2008) gives me together with some Add-ons a tooling that enables me providing solutions for my customers. Here's the list of Extensions I'm currently using:

ReSharper - Very, very hard to do without!
StyleCop for ReSharper - Cannot do without if you are a Clean Code Developer!
PowerToys for the Class Designer - Very nice!
GhostDoc - Hard to do without!

Tool I need to do my job: Live Writer

This is the first post in a series where I will discuss tools I regularly use to do my job. The first one to mention is:

Live Writer which I'm just now using to write this post. Nothing really needed for software development but to maintain my brain extension (this blog).

Rating: Can hardly do without.

Starting a new Blog

This is the first post in a new Blog series about software development. So I should carefully consider what to write and what not. Honestly I'm not a poet and I will never be. I'm a a software developer with passion and with a hard link to technology. So what to start with? When I started my first Blog in voneinem-windbg in 2005 the first post was something like "Hello World...". Unfortunately I deleted this one because I considered it as silly and not serious. The main intention that time was to keep my lernings about windbg for me and as I stated 'possibly for others'. As I can register ~1000 reads/month others can now also benefit from my lernings. Over the time I found myself in the situation that I wanted blog about other things besides debugging so I'm now comming up with this blog. This time I will start again with the famous: Hello world!