What is your best list of 'must have' development tools?

Let me be general [then specific]:

  1. Your IDE of choice [Visual Studio 2008 here]
  2. Your debugger [It is usually part of your IDE, but sometimes WinDbg is needed]
  3. Its plugins for refactoring and source control [ReSharper 4+ and Ankh SVN 2+]
  4. Your OS's addons for source control [TortoiseSVN]
  5. A better Diff and Merge Tool to plug into the above SCM tools [WinMerge]
  6. A fast loading text editor for when your IDE is too much [Vim, Notepad++]
  7. If you're doing web development, get tools for that [Firefox 3 with Add-ons: Web Developer, Firebug, TamperData, Poster, Firecookie, FireFTP, FirePHP, Rainbow for Firebug, ReloadEvery, Selenium IDE]
  8. Requisite tools for working with text [GNU TextUtils, via Cygwin or gnuwin32.sf.net]
  9. Scripting tools [Perl, Python, Z shell, all those GNU base packages in Cygwin]
  10. A regular expression testing tool for when your eyes hurt [Expresso and RegexBuddy]

For Java I swap out 1 and 3 with Eclipse, and its plugins for Maven and SVN. I haven't found a refactoring plug in... you'd think I'd use IntelliJ IDEA, but I never started using it.


Notepad++ for sure


  • Winamp (I love coding with music playing in the background)
  • Coffee