Sometimes I just need to do something that Visual Studio doesn’t do, I need some extra. Here is my hot list of cool and free tools that I find useful, maybe you’ll find something useful?
NUnit – The unit testing framework for .net, don’t write code with it. The first thing I noticed when I started using this was how confident it made me when I had to make a breaking change, safety net heaven.
Nant – Build tool for .net, get this working with NUnit and you’ve got a swish build process going on.
TestDriven.net – Run NUnit tests from within Visual Studio, even debug your code as you run the unit test. Saved me a load of time on those hard to figure out bugs.
Notepad2 – Definitive notepad replace, the most useful tool I’ve got! Just give it a try. Use it everywhere, the Swiss army knife of applications.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Test sites for broken links and generates a report.
WinMerge – Merge files and folders, great tool.
Odysseus – Local Proxy server that can intercept HTTP requests and responses from Internet Explorer. Really useful for testing security of your web applications and seeing the RAW HTTP data.
Reflector – Look inside .net assemblies with this brilliant tool.
WinSQL Lite – Execute SQL statements again ODBC sources, works like Query Analyzer for Access and the like.
Fontlist – Neat application that generates a HTML file showing all the fonts installed on your machine.
WinDirStat – Find out where all your disk space has gone with this great tool, graphically shows disk usage.
MyGeneration - Free code generation tool for .NET, supports a large number of O/R mappers and has templates for DNN module creation.