.NET Development
- Visual Studio - The sine qua non of .NET development, Visual Studio has grown into a mature and capable IDE. Yes, it's expensive -- but Microsoft offers pared-down express versions that are more than adequate for learning or personal development. Unfortunately, Visual Studio lacks in a few areas that older IDEs, specifically in the Java community, excel in. Ergo, the most excellent Visual Studio plugin, ReSharper.
- ReSharper - This is the King of Visual Studio plugins. Its suite of refactoring options, powerful live templating system, real-time code inspections, sensible key bindings, build-in unit test runner, code completion and code navigation tools all come in one salient, reasonably priced package that should tantalize any developer worth his or her salt. And just when you thought it couldn't get any better, ReSharper also supports a handful of free plugins for other technologies such as NHibernate.
- Red Gate .NET Reflector - This fantastic tool, originally written by Lutz Roeder, allows developers to peer inside the dark recesses of .NET assemblies. It leverages Microsoft's disassembly tools to spill the IL guts of any .NET binary, which can be extremely helpful as an API reference or learning tool. It's extensible interface and host of add-ins are just more icing on the cake.
- NHprof (and EFProf, if you absolutely must use Entity Framework) - Ayende Rahien is one of my heroes, if for no other reason that the sheer amount of quality code he can generate in a short amount of time. He is the Chief Brain behind NHibernate, and has written indispensable profilers for both NHibernate and Entity Framework. If you've used either ORM, you know that retrieving complex object graphs from a datastore can be tricky. NHProf and EFProf show developers what goes on under the hood in terms of session statistics and ORM-generated SQL. If you want to learn NHibernate or EF, or just want to tweak them for maximum performance, the *Prof tools are your friend.
PHP Development
- Zend Studio - Produced by Zend, "the PHP company", this IDE borne of sweat, tears, and blood is a hammer in a world of nails. Built on the Eclipse IDE framework, Zend Studio is a full-featured IDE with all the bells and whistles a good developer would expect from such a tool.
- NetBeans - Usually NetBeans is recognized as a superb Java IDE, but since Java and PHP tend to make good bedfellows, the good developers over at the NetBeans project have graciously extended its functionality and produced a formidable PHP plugin for the NetBeans IDE.
- Symfony - Those who think PHP is a toy language have never worked with Symfony. A robust, rich, and powerful web framework, Symfony has set the pace for other web frameworks within, and outside of the PHP community. It is a complete implementation of the classic MVC pattern, and forces a strict segregation between application logic and the user interface. It has native AJAX support, boasts compatibility with no less than three PHP database abstraction layers (PDO, Propel, and Doctrine), provides a PHP unit test runner, a cascading configuration scheme that will melt your brain, and a host of plugins to provide security, DHTML user interface components, third-party application integration, etc.
General Tools
- Enterprise Architect - Early in my career I was convinced it was worthwhile to learn UML. Good diagrams can be powerful communication mediums for sharing abstract concepts in a quick and efficient manner. Enterprise Architect is probably the most affordable comprehensive UML modeling tool on the market. It makes Visio look like a coloring book, and while there are good free and open source modeling alternatives, EA has a suite of powerful features that make it a compelling purchase.
- RegexBuddy - If you want to learn regular expressions, or you need an anvil on which to forge regular expression steel, this is the tool for you. It is a complete parsing engine that walks a developer, step-by-step, through the creation of an expression, and allows a developer to thoroughly test a regular expression's accuracy and efficiency. RegexBuddy also has a grepping engine that will search through files for strings matching expressions, a large library of commonly used expressions (email address, phone number, url, etc.), and a debugging system for determining exactly where an expression stops matching sample text.
Source Control
Social Networking
- Twitter and TweetDeck - When my wife first convinced me to use Twitter, I thought it was a lame Facebook wannabe knockoff tool for the emo kids to whine about life and spammers to assault my intelligence. That is, until I downloaded Tweetdeck, and realized I could create custom searches on cool terms like #csharp, #dotnet, #resharper, #nhibernate, #vs2010, etc., and see what the world of tweeting individuals has to say on such topics, in real time. I've made some acquaintances, learned some new things, bookmarked a few links, and subscribed to new blogs, all because of Twitter.
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