My Essential Developer’s Toolbox – Part II

November 25th, 2008
Programming, Software | No Comments

This is Part II of the My Essential Developer’s Toolbox post reviewing some of the tools I use on a regular basis.

If you missed Part I of the My Essential Developer’s Toolbox I listed some IDEs for ASP.NET, PHP, other open source technologies as well as Database Management applications for Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL. Click here to read the post.

Versioning

If you are not familiar with versioning it’s a process of keeping track of changes you have made to files over time. You start with a base repository and when you make changes you can commit the changes to the repository so that you can review what updates have been made over time. Versioning will help if you need to revert to an old version of your code for a specific file or group of files.

I will write a post up on how to use versioning in the near future.

SVN 1-Click Setup
http://svn1clicksetup.tigris.org/
Thanks to Tigris group for putting this application together. When SVN was first introduced to Windows you had to use Instrsrv.exe and Srvany.exe to create and install a custom service to run SVN server as a service for Windows. But with SVN 1-Click Setup it’s as easy as installing any other application. It will also install TortoiseSVN, the integrated SVN Windows client, and configure the server. Which brings us too…

TortoiseSVN
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
This is bridge from Windows Explorer and the SVN Server. You can create and manage repositories directly from Windows Explorer.

ExamDiff
http://www.prestosoft.com/ps.asp?page=edp_examdiff
The simple interface that ExamDiff uses makes it easy to find diffs for select files. It has a large list of options ranging from filtering, changing the orientation of the windows, searching and much more.

Remote Server Communication

FileZilla FTP Client
http://filezilla-project.org/
This is one tool anyone who transfers files to an FTP server can’t live without. It’s a great free ftp client that has all of the bells and whistles the commercial applications have at the price we love, FREE. It will support every type of FTP protocol including SFTP.

There is also a great FTP server FileZilla provides but is for Windows server only at the moment.

WinSCP
http://winscp.net/
If you need to comminicate to an SSH server or transfer files via SCP this is the tool to use. Great interface and even comes with PUTTY if you need to get access to shell. It will also support SFTP.

PUTTY
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
This super small tool allows Windows clients to access SSH and telnet servers with one application. Does not require installation so it can be ran directly from a USB drive.

Networking Tools

WireShark
http://www.wireshark.org/

This tool is great when you need to review the traffic from your server to the client. You may encounter situations that requires you to verify the raw text that is being transmitted for security reasons or to figure out why you are not getting what you expect from your web application.

Text Editors

Notepad++
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

This is my favorite text editor. Especially when you need to make quick changes to files without having to open up your IDE. It supports tabs, syntax highlighting for a large number of languages such as C#, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Perl, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, XML and much more. Also has code folding and a multitude of macros to convert your file to a different format, change line terminators and more. Highly suggest this application to everyone.