Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Top 5 Developer Productivity Tools

I've been a software developer for over 4 years now, and have found these 5 tools to be indispensable in my daily development role.

5. Notepad++ - http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
A much more powerful, yet easy to use and low overhead text editor that will give you syntax highlighting for most languages, formatting for xml, html, and a bunch of plugins.  I see this program on more and more blogs about tools developers shouldn't live without.  This is one of the first programs I install on a new computer!

4. Fiddler - http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/
A very easy to use http analytic tool.  I can look at, and create http requests using any HTTP verb you can imagine.  It's easy to save requests that you've created making it an invaluable end to end testing tool.

3. WinSCP - http://winscp.net/eng/index.php
Need I say more?  An excellent FTP/SFTP and more tool that seamlessly can turn into a putty session allowing you to have a ssh session with the server. Simple, clean, quick.

2. Ditto - http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/index.php
I'm continually surprised that every developer (or even person who works on a computer for any amount every day) doesn't already have their own clip-board manager.  I use ditto because it's simple, yet keeps my clips organized.  It get's out of the way when I don't want to see it, and it can pop back up in an instant when I do.  Searching old clips have saved me many times when a reference to "something" would have been lost.  I can't stress enough how much of a productivity increase you get with a clip board manager.

1. Launchy - http://www.launchy.net/
Even more than a clipboard manager, no-one should have to browse every program installed on their computer in order to open one of them ever again.  Launchy is an incredibly easy to configure/install application that does precisely what it sounds like....Launches applications, urls, or whatever command you tell it to.  The plugins that come standard allow you to create any command you would run on a command line.  A lot of launcher applications require manual configuration for every program you want to run, but Launchy automatically indexes your programs and adds them to a list.  It's intelligent so programs you use more often will appear towards the top.  With a quick keystroke I can launch any program on my computer.

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