My developer toolbox

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Here a post to list my 10 more interesting tools that I use very often in my everyday job. Visual Studio and Expression Blend are the tools I use all day long, the goal of this post is to give you some interesting tools.

.net development

Visual Studio Gallery lists many interesting tools:

  • Productivity Power Tools
  • Power Commands for Visual studio
  • Team Foundation
  • Regex Editor
  • tangible T4 Editor plus modeling tools for VS2010
  • …

Reflector is the tool used, as written on the red-gate site, “Explore and analyze .NET assemblies”.

A lot of add-ins exists –>Reflector Add-Ins. One I always use is Baml Viewer. It loads and render the BAML in XAML.

PInvoke.Net is in a same time a reference web site but also tool helping into interaction with com dll.

LinqPad helps you to create Linq queries (Linq to Objects, Linq to XML, Entity Framework, …) but also you can also write code and it’s instantly executed.

WPF development

Snoop helps you in your WPF developments, it displays the visual tree of your application (you also can see it in 3D). I use it to understand why a specific WPF control is not displayed correctly.

Mole (available for Visual Studio 2008) is a WPF visualizer, very useful when debugging your application and more precisely WPF visual tree or logical tree.

Http debugger

Fiddler is a web debugging proxy.

File and Disk utilities

When do not know why a file is already used by another process or what’s happening on your system Process Monitor is the tool. It traces in real time file, registry and process activity.

Memory debugger

WinDBG is available in the Microsoft Windows SDK ( Seven version, for other version of OS ). It helps you into finding memory leaks.

Visual Studio + sos.dll (sos.dll is i) is also an other way to find memory leaks.