tools of the trade

I thought I'd start a thread where people can post which tools they use when programming with .NET.  This could be IDE's, Debugging tools, Documentation tools, Languages, Profilers, etc.

I use:

Visual Studio .NET 2003 (C# coding/debuging mostly)
MSDN Library (obvious...)
FxCop (Analizes code and writes you parking tickets or something...)
Reflector (A sweeeeeet .NET Assembly browser/Decompiler)

Thats about it.  I'm looking to expand my usage of tools, so please dont be shy and list off everything you use!

For .NET: just VisualStudio 2003 and the MSDN library collection for VS. No other funky tools, sorry

I'm also a DBA, so I use all the SQL2K client tools too (I spend a lot of time in Query Analyzer, writing TSQL scripts and procedures).

And for classic ASP: good old Interdev with XMLCheck plugin..

For me the staples are:

Visual Studio 2003
MSDN
notepad & the csc.exe (for quick projects)

Sometimes I'll check out other tools (similiar to "XML Notepad") especially XML editors, not really to see what the competition is doing, but more searching for the easist to use tool for editing XML, XSLT & XSD.

Any freeware suggestions?

I recently had to do some serious HTML parsing for a client. Regular expressions were the way to go. So I downloaded RegexDesigner.NET from Chris Sells site:
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/tools/#regexd
This tool is great, simple to use and even generates code for you!
In fact that site is packed full of really useful tools.

Thanks Chris - you saved me a whole lot of time!
P.S. Maybe you can get the RegexDesigner into Visual Studio?

Here at TAIsoftware we use

VS.Net 2003    (of course)
MSDN           (Ditto)
VS 6 (for some older vb apps we support)

Databases
SQLServer 7 and 2000
Postgres
Oracle
Cache'
DB2
MYSQL

I was tired of using different tools for each of these DB engines so we wrote a tool that supports most of what these engines can do via ODBC connections and mimics the interface of the SQLServer client tools for SQLServer 2000.

We also wrote our own GRID control that is in most every thing we write for our customers in one form or another.

We have also written our own Graphing Controls, and data visualization controls for simillar purposes.

We tend to craft what we need for things because part of our process leaves our clients with the source for their applications. As we do a good job they don't usually have a need for anyone else but if they did they would not be left in the lurch with the binaries for an application that they could not fix a problem with. By being fairly plain jane our clients can replicate the env that their products were developed in without alot of expense and configuration know-how.
 

I also recommend the following:

NDoc - documentation generator

NUnit - unit testing tool

CLRSpy - tool for using CDPs

Andrew Davey wrote:

I recently had to do some serious HTML parsing for a client. Regular expressions were the way to go. So I downloaded RegexDesigner.NET from Chris Sells site:
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/tools/#regexd
This tool is great, simple to use and even generates code for you!
In fact that site is packed full of really useful tools.

Thanks Chris - you saved me a whole lot of time!
P.S. Maybe you can get the RegexDesigner into Visual Studio?

Download link is erroring out....another source?

another site to download the app:
 http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=01e0dfb7-0182-45cd-94f7-2ed2df2504a9