Thursday, August 9, 2007

Developer Tools

For people who live, eat and breathe technology, it seems like we don't often vary the tools that we use. For instance, we find a text editor that we like (I still don't have one I'm wild about - I must have used MultiEdit for 5 years, Notepad++ is the current editor-de-jour) and stick with it until someone else shows us . How long has Fiddler been out? How long did it take me to learn how it worked? Likewise with the IE Developer tool bar, like with
with Nant, NUnit... take your pick.

I think part of the issue is that SO many of the tools are really bad, have poor/no documentation and it takes a while to learn them... only to realize the tool itself is flawed. A lot comes down to plain ole usability - complicated tools are hard to use, and won't get used much (a theme in "Don't Make me Think" by Krug)

Not a bad starting list - what are you guys using?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/07/MustHaveTools/

Current tools I'm using daily/weekly/would die without:
Notepad ++
NAnt
NUnit
ClearContext (Outlook add-in, still under investigation)
Fiddler
IE Developer Toolbar
Reflector
Regulator
Google Bookmarks
FeedReader

2 comments:

Luke said...

How about Google Notebook (http://www.google.com/notebook/), FireBug (http://www.getfirebug.com/), and Google Reader (www.google.com/reader) which I'm currently using to view this blog.

Scott said...

Firebug's a good one - I don't use it, but one of our developers does uses it a lot.

Haven't seen Google Notebook - looks neat. I tried Google Reader, but it didn't stick. Maybe time to try again.