Sunday, May 31, 2009

Handy utilities and tools

Some of my favourite utilities and tools.


General Tools

  • Free multi-monitor toolbar
  • Foxmarks - synchronise your bookmarks between browsers and machines
  • MS Live mesh - Synchronise folders between machiines
  • Evernote - Synchronise notes between PC's, linux, Macs, Blackberries, Windows Mobile devices and IPhones.
  • Thunderbird - Email client with kickass spam filtering
  • ZoomIt - A screen zoom and annotation tool. Excellent for presentations.
  • Stardock Fences - A free program that helps you organize your desktop, and can hide your icons when they're not in use.
  • SharedView - There's a lot of screen sharing utilities out there. There's even Remote Assistance built into Windows. But when you need 15 people to share your screen, each with their own mouse, you want it to work over firewalls and you want it free, there's SharedView.
  • Paint.NET - The Paint Program that Microsoft forgot, written in .NET. If you like to live on the edge, go get the Paint.NET 3.5 Alpha build with enhanced Windows 7 features.
  • Fiddler - The easy, clean, and powerful debugging proxy for checking out HTTP between here and there. It even supports sniffing SSL traffic.
  • 7-Zip - It's over and 7zip won. Time to get on board. You'll typically get between 2% and 10% better compression than ZIP. This app integrates into Windows Explorer nicely and opens basically EVERYTHING you could ever want to open from TARs to ISOs, from RARs to CABs.
  • SysInternals - ProcExp is a great Taskman replacement and includes the invaluable "Find DLL" feature. It can also highlight any .NET processes. AutoRuns is an amazing aggregated view of any and all things that run at startup on your box.
    • A great new addition to the SysInternals Family is Process Monitor, a utility that eclipses both Filemon and Regmon. It runs on any version of Windows and lets you see exactly what a process is doing. Indispensable for developing.
    • It's also worth calling out the legendary Process Explorer as a standout and must-have utility.
  • Windows Live Writer - If you've got a blog (and if not, why not?) then this is THE app. They've also got a thriving plugin community.
  • .NET Reflector - If you haven't heard of Reflector you're probably not a .NET developer. The tool that changed the world and the way we learn about .NET. Download it, select an interesting method and hit the space bar. Take the time to install the Add-Ins and check out the amazing static analysis you can do with things like the Diff and Graph.
  • LogParser - Get to know it, as it's a free command-line tool from Microsoft that lets you run SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources, and get the results out to an array of destinations, from SQL tables to CSV files.
  • EtherPad - This web-based multi-person interactive notepad has quickly become my #1 tool for brainstorming online with my remote team.
  • VLC Media Player – Plays everything.
  • Color Scheme Designer - I'm not a designer and I have no style, but I do know what I like. This site makes it easy to brainstorm, design and tweak a colour scheme for your next big project.
  • Windows Live Writer - The ultimate offline Blog Post tool. It has an easy SDK. If you don't like it, change it.
  • ImgBurn -  has the right balance of clean interface and piles of technical information.
  • SpaceSniffer - Everyone's always looking for a great tool to find out what's taking up all the space on your hard drive. SpaceSniffer is fast, pretty, fun to watch and powerful.

 

    SharePoint Tools

    • U2U Caml query builder
    • SharePoint Manager

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